All posts tagged duel

Miss Mapp by E.F. Benson (1922)

Anger and the gravest suspicions about everybody had kept her young and on the boil.
(Miss Mapp’s spiteful character, Chapter 1)

If there was a quality – and, indeed, there were many – on which Tilling prided itself, it was on its immunity from snobbishness.
(Comic irony, Chapter 2)

The correct attitude in Tilling was profound indifference to anybody of whatever degree who did not live at Tilling, and to anything that did not happen there.
(Chapter 2)

As far as she [Diva] was aware, passion, except in the sense of temper, did not exist in Tilling. Tilling was far too respectable.
(Chapter 6)

All semblance of manners was invariably thrown to the winds by the ladies of Tilling when once bridge began; primeval hatred took their place. The winners of any hand were exasperatingly condescending to the losers, and the losers correspondingly bitter and tremulous.
(Chapter 2)

Diva had ‘popped’ into the grocer’s. She always popped everywhere just now; she popped across to see a friend, and she popped home again; she popped into church on Sunday, and occasionally popped up to town, and Miss Mapp was beginning to feel that somebody ought to let her know, directly or by insinuation, that she popped too much.
(Chapter 2)

‘Our fair friends, you know, have a pretty sharp eye for each other’s little failings. They’ve no sooner finished one squabble than they begin another, the pert little fairies.’
(Major Flint on Tilling’s womenfolk)

There were smiles and smiles, respectful smiles, sympathetic smiles, envious and admiring smiles, but there were also smiles of hilarious and mocking incredulity. [Miss Mapp] concluded that she had to deal with the latter variety.
(Managing the malice behind social conventions, Chapter 7)

‘You wish to see me, Major Flint?’ she said, in such a voice as icebergs might be supposed to use when passing each other by night in the Arctic seas.
(Chapter 7)

When he first conceived of Miss Mapp, Benson was obviously following up the success of its predecessor comic novel, ‘Queen Lucia’. Only slowly did it dawn on him that these humorous books about monstrously snobbish women in English provincial towns offered a whole new subject. According to his biographer, Brian Masters, he realised that ‘his financial future might very well depend thenceforth upon his creation of monstrous women’ and that is indeed what happened, as he developed the Mapp and Lucia characters into a series which eventually consisted of six books and two short stories.

In the first novel, Emmeline Lucas aka Lucia lords it over the fictional village of Riseholme with its population of arty provincial ladies. Benson situated his new creation, Miss Elizabeth Mapp, in Tillingham, which is an only lightly fictionalised version of the twee tourist town of Rye, on the Kent coast.

Rye already had a reputation as being a bit of a writer’s resort, having played host to Joseph Conrad, Henry James and H.G. Wells among other luminaries. Obviously none of these appear in the book which is, instead, about the same kind of rivalrous, gossipy, bitchy women as ‘Queen Lucia’. With this difference: they’re poorer and nastier.

In the first couple of chapters Benson goes out of his way to describe how ‘straitened’ the circumstances of his little crew are. Lucia’s Risenholme set have dinner parties and evenings’ entertainments, they include an international opera singer and the local Lady of the manor. Elizabeth Mapp’s Tillingham circle is distinctly poorer and more constrained. Benson gives a detailed explanation why:

Dinner-parties entailed a higher scale of living; Miss Mapp, for one, had accurately counted the cost of having three hungry people to dinner, and found that one such dinner-party was not nearly compensated for, in the way of expense, by being invited to three subsequent dinner-parties by your guests. Voluptuous teas were the rule, after which you really wanted no more than little bits of things, a cup of soup, a slice of cold tart, or a dished-up piece of fish and some toasted cheese. Then, after the excitement of bridge (and bridge was very exciting in Tilling), a jig-saw puzzle or Patience cooled your brain and composed your nerves. In winter, however, with its scarcity of daylight, Tilling commonly gave evening bridge-parties, and asked the requisite number of friends to drop in after dinner, though everybody knew that everybody else had only partaken of bits of things. Probably the ruinous price of coal had something to do with these evening bridge-parties, for the fire that warmed your room when you were alone would warm all your guests as well, and then, when your hospitality was returned, you could let your sitting-room fire go out.

So their timid and limited social activities are in part determined by the price of coal. ‘Shabby genteel’ is, I think, the phrase. Google AI defines it as:

‘Shabby genteel’ describes a state of being where someone or something appears shabby or impoverished but still strives to maintain the appearance or manners of gentility.

Their limited circumstances explain why everyone in Miss Mapp’s little set cordially hates Mrs Poppit, who is richer than them, and does hold rather grand gatherings. She has a butler! And a car!! Everyone smiles and curtseys to her face but whispers all kinds of malicious gossip behind her back, because she doesn’t share what they consider their ‘good breeding and narrow incomes‘.

Although Isabel [Poppit] conformed to the manners of Tilling in doing household shopping every morning with her wicker basket, and buying damaged fruit for fool, and in dressing in the original home-made manner indicated by good breeding and narrow incomes, Miss Mapp was sadly afraid that these habits were not the outcome of chaste and instinctive simplicity, but of the ambition to be received by the old families of Tilling as one of them.

Accompanying the financial constraints is a similar restriction of horizons. Miss Mapp’s world is tiny, bounded by the view from her front room window from where she can keep an eye on people going to or from Tillingham church, on the front doors of the two retired military men, Major Flint and Captain Puffin, and see down the hill to the high street. She is a classic curtain twitcher, glued to her window and spying on everyone’s comings and goings.

There was little that concerned the social movements of Tilling that could not be proved, or at least reasonably conjectured, from Miss Mapp’s eyrie.

The microscopic parochialism of this tiny-minded community is very amusingly mocked by Benson:

The correct attitude in Tilling was profound indifference to anybody of whatever degree who did not live at Tilling, and to anything that did not happen there. In particular, any manifestation of interest in kings or other distinguished people was held to be a very miserable failing.

This is what makes a person ‘Tillingite to the marrow’.

Direct link with Lucia

Incidentally, early on the narrative makes an explicit link between Miss Mapp’s Tilling and Lucia’s Riseholme:

She [Miss Mapp] had heard it last month when on a visit to a friend at that sweet and refined village called Riseholme. It was rather looked down on there, as not being sufficiently intellectual. But within a week of Miss Mapp’s return, Tilling rang with it, and she let it be understood that she was the original humourist…

The ‘it’ in question is a jokey way of saying goodbye Miss Mapp has introduced into Tilling, substituting not the French au revoir but a jokey expansion of it to au reservoir. All the characters jokily say ‘Au reservoir’ on ending their countless little encounters in the street or at bridge parties throughout the novel. Just this one fleeting reference is enough to confirm your sense that Miss Mapp’s Tilling set is a distinct notch down the social and cultural scale from Lucia’s Riseholm set.

Miss Mapp

She’s a nasty piece of work, this Miss Elizabeth Mapp, 40, single and spiteful.

The Major cast an apprehensive eye on Miss Mapp seated just opposite, whose acuteness of hearing was one of the terrors of Tilling…

She presents a beaming smile to the world and has a friendly word for everyone, but behind her mask she is endlessly hatching new ways to catch out and humiliate her ‘friends’, a mind devoted to ‘distilling all sorts of acidities’.

In spite of her malignant curiosity and her cancerous suspicions about all her friends, in spite, too, of her restless activities, Miss Mapp was not, as might have been expected, a lady of lean and emaciated appearance. She was tall and portly, with plump hands, a broad, benignant face and dimpled, well-nourished cheeks. An acute observer might have detected a danger warning in the sidelong glances of her rather bulgy eyes, and in a certain tightness at the corners of her expansive mouth, which boded ill for any who came within snapping distance…

She is well known to all the shopkeepers of Tilling as a tight-pursed, cantankerous customer. She terrifies Major Flint:

‘A powerful woman she is, with a powerful tongue, and able to be powerful nasty…’ (p.197)

The comedy starts, as it were, with being amazed at just how much devious malice can fill the breast of one malevolent, hypocritical spinster woman. It is then elaborated as we (rather inevitably) see so many of her clever plans to humiliate her enemies blow up in her own face. In this, the basic structure of the comedy (malevolent schemer’s plans backfire) she is identical to Queen Lucia in the first book.

For example in Chapter 2 Miss Mapp devotes an inordinate amount of mental energy to calculating how to ruin the bridge evening being held by Mrs Poppit, only herself to be worsted. When she cheats at bridge she is discovered and criticised. And so on. The biter bit.

Miss Mapp’s enemies

Difficult to know who she hates more. Is it Mrs Poppit or Miss Coles or Godiva ‘Diva’ Plaistow?

Mrs Poppit

Posh Mrs Poppit has a butler – the amusingly lugubrious Boon – an offensively grand car – which she offensively refers to as ‘the Royce’. She and her daughter go to Switzerland every winter and Scotland every summer. In other words, compared to everyone else, they’re loaded!

Towering over everything in triggering the malicious envy of the genteel set is that, horrible to say, she has recently been awarded an MBE! Member of the Order of the British Empire! Tillingham is outraged because all she did to earn this ridiculous honour was put ‘the Royce’ and its chauffeur at the disposal of Tillingham hospital during the war, she herself didn’t lift a finger. Miss Mapp and her set quietly seethe with resentment at the way their war work – the work of the Tilling Working Club, which had knitted its fingers to the bone and made enough seven-tailed bandages to reach to the moon – received precisely no recognition! Unfair world! After one particularly mortifying humiliation, Miss Mapp feels:

If she had had a naval fifteen-inch gun handy, and had known how to fire it, she would, with a sense of duty accomplished, have discharged it point-blank at the Order of the Member of the British Empire, and at anybody else who might be within range…

Miss Irene Coles

As far as I can tell, Irene Coles is a portrait of a cigarette-smoking, masculine kind of lesbian. In Miss Mapp’s outraged view she is:

The Disgrace of Tilling and her sex, the suffragette, post-impressionist artist (who painted from the nude, both male and female), the socialist and the Germanophile, Miss Coles.

Miss Mapp has tried her utmost ‘to poison the collective mind of Tilling against this Creature’ but ‘the bitterest part of it all was that if Miss Coles was amused at anybody, and she undoubtedly was, she was amused at Miss Mapp’.

Miss Mapp keeps trying to humiliate and genteelly mock Miss Coles and yet, somehow, the chunky mannish woman artist, dressed like a jockey and puffing on a gasper, always laughs her off. Time and again, Miss Mapp is left seething with toxic rage.

Part of it is that she’s scared of her. Miss Coles is clever:

Irene called her Mapp because she chose to, and Mapp (more bitterness) felt it wiser not to provoke Coles. She had a dreadful, humorous tongue, an indecent disregard of public or private opinion, and her gift of mimicry was as appalling as her opinion about the Germans. Sometimes Miss Mapp alluded to her as ‘quaint Irene,’ but that was as far as she got in the way of reprisals.

Mock heroic

Reprisals, bitterness, scheming, malice – it makes it sound like international diplomacy during a crisis this is Benson’s trick, the series’ USP: to invest the minutiae of small town life, and its myriad petty rivalries and jealousies, with astonishing complexity, scheming and strategy. It is a version of the mock heroic, applying the highest, most serious style and tone and intellectual rigour, to the most ludicrously trivial incidents.

Thus the war of the two dresses (which I explain below) is said to involve ‘treachery and low cunning’, ‘fiendish revenge’, ‘malice and envy’ such as never known in all human history, as well as ‘the joy of battle’ and the sweetness of revenge (Chapter 4) – and all the other silly incidents and little bickerings are raised to the level of, and given the detailed analysis worthy of, full-blown military campaigns, very amusingly and hyperbolically.

Whatever attack she made on this mystery, the garrison failed to march out and surrender but kept their flag flying, and her conjectures were woefully blasted by the forces of the most elementary reasons. (p.136)

To one of Miss Mapp’s experience, the first step of her new and delightful strategic campaign was obvious, and she spent hardly any time at all in the window of her garden-room after breakfast next morning, but set out with her shopping-basket at an unusually early hour.

And, as in Queen Lucia, Benson even throws in a few mock heroic similes to amuse his literate readers, signalled by the poetic inversion at the end of the sentence:

Even as Athene sprang full grown and panoplied from the brain of Zeus, so from Diva’s brain there sprang her plan complete.

Cast

  • Miss Elizabeth Mapp – spies on all Tilling’s comings and goings with ‘her light aluminium opera-glasses’ – ‘old Mappy’ to Flint and Puffin (p.107)
    • Withers, her parlourmaid
  • Major Benjamin Flint – ‘was the more attractive to the feminine sense; for years Miss Mapp had tried to cajole him into marrying her, and had not nearly finished yet’ – when she feels soppy, Miss Mapp secretly calls him ‘Major Benjy’
    • Mrs Dominic – his maid
  • Captain Puffin – ‘He was lame and short and meagre, with strings of peaceful beads and Papuan aprons in his hall instead of wild tiger-skins, and had a jerky, inattentive manner and a high-pitched voice. Yet to Miss Mapp’s mind there was something behind his unimpressiveness that had a mysterious quality’ – irritating falsetto laugh, limp
    • housemaid
    • Mrs Gashly – his cook
  • Mrs Godiva Plaistow aka ‘Diva’ – carrying her wicker basket, ‘a short, stout, breathless body’, peculiar way of walking as if she has wheels instead of legs – endless rivalrous scheming against Miss Mapp – stuffs her face with chocolates at every opportunity (p.141) – bitter enemy in ‘the dress war’ – speaks in telegraphese: ‘Lucky birds,’ she said. ‘No teeth. Beaks’ – guaranteed to cause an argument at every bridge session
    • Janet – her parlourmaid
  • Mrs Susan Poppit – amazingly awarded an MBE, solely for lending her motor car to the local hospital – a social climber – has a butler, car and posh holidays – keeps a notebook of malapropisms and spoonerisms
  • Isabel Poppit – her adoring daughter
    • Boon, her butler
  • Miss Irene Coles – ‘Irene lived in a very queer way with one gigantic maid, Lucy, who, but for her sex, might have been in the Guards’ – presumably a lesbian (?)
  • Mr Kenneth Bartlett – the vicar, good at cards – ‘Mr Bartlett was humorously archaic in speech. He interlarded archaisms with Highland expressions, and his face was knobby, like a chest of drawers’
  • Mrs Evie Bartlett – his wife, aka ‘wee wifey’, mousey, emits high-pitched squeaks and squeals
  • Mr Algernon Wyse – generally seen as posh, spends long summers with his sister, the Contessa di Faraglione, at Capri – declines most invitations, but invites everyone to his weekly Thursday luncheons
    • Figgis – his valet
  • Amelia, the Contessa di Faraglione, when she arrives, fearlessly outspoken and flirtatious
  • Mr Dabnet – keeper of the Tilling toy shop
  • Mr Wootten – the coal merchant
  • Mr Twemlow – the grocer
  • Mr Hopkins – the fishmonger, who models for Irene Coles in the nude
  • Miss Greele – dressmaker
  • Mrs Brace – the doctor’s wife

Major incidents

The failed attempt to sabotage Mrs Poppit’s bridge

Mrs Poppit only casually invites Miss Mapp to a bridge afternoon, which Miss Mapp takes as an insult and triggers feverish calculations of how to screw up the occasion. During the course of the morning she casually introduces the topic with all the usual suspects in order to figure out precisely how many people have been invited. Eight is the ideal number, creating two tables of four. Miss Mapp decides she will ‘squeeze’ her visit in in such a way as to create too many guests and thus embarrass her hostess.

In the event, all these calculations are futile because she makes up the eighth guest with no confusion and so the party proceeds smoothly – exactly what she was hoping to prevent.

The abortive visit of the Prince of Wales

Because of her recent visit to Buckingham Palace to receive her MBE, Mrs Poppit lets slip her knowledge that the Prince of Wales will be passing through the town on Saturday, on his way to Ardingly Park. This is because Tilling is the nearest railway station for Ardingly.

Now the thing about all genteel Tillingites is they have this cult that absolutely nothing which happens outside Tilling, or anyone who comes from outside Tilling, is of the slightest interest. Except that, of course, a visit from royalty triggers their grossest snobberies.

So the comedy of this passage derives from the way all the seven or eight characters we’ve come to know all pretend to each other to not be giving the Prince’s fleeting visit the slightest thought, while secretly, of course, they are all buying the train timetable, getting our their best suits and frocks, even buying little Union Jack flags, and all plan to accidentally just ‘happen’ to be in the little square in front of the railway station.

Miss Mapp is among the most outstandingly hypocritical of the bunch, in conversations continually claiming to have forgotten all about it while, as the time of the most likely train approaches, she mounts to the roof window of her house and uses binoculars to identify that towards 4.15 (time of a train arrival) lots of others are assembling in the square. So she rushes downstairs, checks herself in the mirror and bustles along to the square. She arrives just as a swish car is pulling away and, deciding to show the hoi polloi what a proper curtsey looks like, stoops so low that she in fact loses her balance and clumsily sits down in the road just as the car sweeps by. Just in time to hear laughter coming from the people inside who saw her squat so clumsily into the street.

The others come up and crowingly tell her that wasn’t the Prince of Wales at all; he arrived on the one o’clock train so they all missed him, and has been happily playing golf all afternoon. Humiliation.

And there’s a comic coda. The next day is Sunday and the genteel set hope the prince might attend their church but he doesn’t show. The Major and the Captain go off to play golf and, given news of the Prince’s golf the day before, they are surprised to find every hole and bunker unusually populated with Tillingites, clearly hoping to catch a glimpse of Royalty, although all telling each other and themselves that they don’t care in the slightest. Miss Mapp is among them.

But the joke is that on the day that most of Tilling went out to the golf course to see the Prince, the Prince decided to go sightseeing in Tilling. When Miss Mapp returns exhausted from a day traipsing round the golf course, her servant tells her the Prince, had spent five minutes outside Miss Mapp’s very own garden room, and had even sat on the steps and smoked a cigarette. On her steps! Outside her house! She missed him. Again!

The humiliating battle of the decorated dresses

Miss Mapp discovers that Diva has taken down her shabby old chintz curtains and is carefully cutting out the roses from their pattern, with the aim of sewing the roses onto her blouse to jazz it up.

She was preparing, therefore, to take the light white jacket which she wore over her blouse, and cover the broad collar and cuffs of it with these pretty roses.

Miss Mapp is inspired by this discovery, not just to adapt it herself but – characteristically – to get one over on Diva and humiliate her, by doing the same kind of thing first! So she goes home, rummages around, finds a worn chintz cover that had once adorned the sofa in the garden-room and is covered with red poppies (very easy to cut out). She sets her maid, Withers, to cut out the poppy patterns and sew them onto one of her plain dresses, in a race to beat Diva.

By working her maid hard she has her poppy-strewn dress ready by the next day and goes swanking around Tilling, making sure to call into every shop (sometimes several times), swan up and down the high street, pop her head into all her friends’ front doors and generally demonstrate how fantastically original and creative she has been in creating such a wonderfully decorative dress!

This, when she sees it, of course, drives Diva wild with rage and mortification… until she has a brainwave, a drastic plan to get her own back. She will give the beautiful rose-decorated jacket she and her maid, Janet, are just getting to the end of creating to her maid. Janet is bowled over with gratitude. She doesn’t quite realise Diva has made this magnanimous gift solely to humiliate Miss Mapp.

Her plan works. When everyone sees Janet wearing the rose-studded dress they instantly associate it with the servant class and at a stroke Miss Mapp’s coup is turned into a public humiliation. Triumph for Diva!

Miss Mapp’s hoarding revealed

There are rumours of an impending coal strike. Since everyone’s homes and cookers are heated by coal this represents a real threat. The government gives out that nobody should hoard either coal or food. Miss Mapp genteelly warns Diva that there is a law against it and she might be prosecuted. But observing Miss M visiting the grocer every day, instead of every couple of days like normal folk, Diva starts to suspect that it’s old Mappy who’s hoarding.

She confirms the coal hoarding by cross-questioning the coal merchant, Mr Wootten. Then she racks her brains – she and Mapp are shown on pretty much every page, racking their brains and engaging in intense cerebration to puzzle out the secrets of each others’ behaviour, just as Miss Mapp devotes hours to speculating on what the Major and the Captain really get up to – to think where in Miss Mapp’s small house she could be hoarding food.

She has a brainwave when she realises that the big bookcase, against which the bridge table is usually pressed on tea dates, is fake – it’s just a facade of book covers with no depth. Next time she’s invited for bridge at Miss Mapp’s, Diva arrives early and while the maid is calling Miss M, she hurries to the bookcase in question, pushes the bridge table away, feels up and down it and locates the secret catch. Undoing it she confirms her suspicions for the whole facade of spines of books begins to open revealing a concealed larder.

Unfortunately, as she opens it a fraction she hears something fall off a shelf within and this means she can’t quite push it to enough to redo the catch. She hears Miss Mapp coming and squeezes it as shut as possible and wedges the bridge table back up against it, scooting away as Miss Mapp enters the room.

So far, so full of secrets and lies and hypocrisies and cunning plans for revenge and exposure and humiliation i.e. standard Tilling behaviour. What happens next turns comedy into farce. For before the bridge commences, Miss Mapp treats her guests to tea and chocolate cake and shows Mrs Poppit, whose first visit it is, round her house. Mrs Poppit closely inspects the fittings of the garden room and, when she comes to the bookshelf, innocently points out to her daughter that she thinks it looks fake and gives it a little tug and…

The fake frontage swings open and Miss Mapp’s entire illicit hoard of goodies comes tumbling forth, a sack of flour falling on the floor, followed by tins of corned beef, packets of Bath Oliver biscuits, jars of Bovril and a pack of dried apricots which promptly bursts and scatters numerous sticky fruits all over the floor where Miss Mapp’s astonished guests tread on them, getting them stuck to the soles of their shoes. Diva watches all this from a distance, absolutely delighted that she in no way can be blamed for the disaster:

The birthday of her life had come! (p.99)

Extremely typical of Miss Mapp and the whole world Benson has invented is the way Miss Mapp proceeds to cover herself by making up a cock-and-bull story about all these goodies, far from being hoarding – goodness me, no, dear Diva – was ‘my poor little Christmas presents for your needy parishioners, Padre’. Nobody believes her for a moment, but face is saved, a little.

The secret drinkers

A recurring comic theme is that both Major Flint and Captain Puffin are observed to stay up very late at night i.e. their bedroom lights are on till way past 11. They tell the town that they are ardently pursuing very serious studies, namely that the Major is editing the diaries of his imperial service in India while the Captain is carrying out in-depth researches into Roman roads and ruins. Miss Mapp, seeing herself in the role of a Guardian Angel, keeps a beady eye on their late lights and is always telling these old men (the Major is, in fact, only 54) that they should keep more regular hours and conduct their studies healthily, in the morning.

Except that half-way through the novel, after playing one of their rounds of golf, Flint and Puffin, hilariously confess to each other that neither of them are conducting these famous studies: Flint never kept a diary in India, Puffin knows next to nothing about Roman archaeology, they just stay up late drinking. So they resolve to henceforward do so in company, and take to visiting each other’s houses on alternate evenings. It becomes a schoolboyish private joke between them.

The Major said, ‘Well, I’ll step across, shall I, about half-past nine, and bring my diaries with me?
‘I’ll expect you. You’ll find me at my Roman roads.’
The humour of this joke never staled, and they parted with hoots and guffaws of laughter. (p.168)

This late-night drinking emerges as an unexpectedly major theme of the story. First of all, Miss Mapp, observing that at least one of their lights now goes off in the mid-evening on alternating evenings, is convinced that her words of advice are working half the time and the poor military men are getting early nights at least half the week. But the major outcome of these convivial nights together is the huge argument which leads to the duel!

The duel that never was

The argument On one particular night they are at Major Flint’s and the two men’s shabby genteel poverty triggers an argument about who is drinking most of the Captain’s bottle of whiskey. Like all their arguments it quickly escalates until the Captain drunkenly staggers out of Flint’s bedroom and across the street to his own house. He passes out on his bed. Early in the morning he hears the metallic clink of the flap of his letterbox, stumbles out of bed, and discovers the Major has hand delivered a challenge to a duel!

Sir,
My seconds will wait on you in the course of to-morrow morning.
Your faithful obedient servant.
Benjamin Flint

Captain Puffin panics He staggers back to bed and passes out but wakes up a few hours in the grip of fear, then panic. What if it’s literally true? The Major is a much better shot than him! It’s an invitation to certain death. In a hungover panic he packs his bags, leaves a note for the maid, and staggers out carrying a big Gladstone bag and along to the station to catch the first train to London, the 6.30am.

Meeting at Tilling train station Arriving 15 minutes early he undergoes agonies of anxiety when he hears heavy footsteps and… it is Major Flint, also carrying a big bag, arriving to catch the same train! Long story short, they both realise they are cowards and are running away from the duel which Flint so rashly threatened. After a few moments’ embarrassment they burst into laughter, agree never to be so silly again, and set off for the golf course where they go to play every day.

Word gets round However – Captain Puffin was silly enough to leave Major Flint’s note threatening the duel on his mantelpiece at home, where it is discovered later in the morning by Puffin’s maid, who promptly rings up Flint’s maid, they both discover their masters are absent, and word spreads like wildfire that the two men have gone off to the sand dunes near the gold course to fight a duel. When word spreads to the Mapp circle the vicar gets dragged in and ends up volunteering to rush off to the dunes to try and prevent a potentially tragic loss of life.

Vicar to the rescue He takes a taxi (agonising over the unwonted expense) and then spends the whole morning timidly peeping his head over the brow of every dune, half expecting to get it shot off by a stray bullet or, worse, coming across the bodies of one of the shot men. After an exhausting and anxious morning, hot and dirty and sweaty, the vicar arrives at the golf course proper, where he sees… Flint and Puffin just completing their morning game of golf in a jovial and merry way, and they invite him for drinks at the club. Comedy!

Anxious anticipation It doesn’t even end there because the good ladies of Tilling, now thoroughly alerted to news of the duel, are on tenterhooks back in town to find out what has happened. Miss Mapp carefully works out about ten possible scenarios and variations, which the text carefully numbers and describes, involving numbers of stretchers and bodies and doctors in attendance on the poor men etc. Imagine her disappointment when the after lunch tram arrives only for Major Flint, Captain Puffin and the vicar to all step off it large as life and obviously hale and hearty. More comedy!

Hippopotamus Incidentally, at the height of the squabble which started it all, Captain Puffin in his drunkenness struggled to pronounce the word ‘hippopotamus’ and they and the narrator all refer back to it as ‘the hippopotamus quarrel’ (p.165).

Was it for a woman? The duel gag continues for quite a long time, Benson stretches it out further than you’d think possible, which is itself an old comic trick but it’s also distinctively Bensonite to show how even trivial incidents have long, complex ramifications in such a closed, paranoid society of hyper-alert, hyper-curious people.

Was the duel for her? Because Miss Mapp can’t let this incident of the duel alone, and one aspect which dogs her is what was the duel about? She leaps to the sentimental conclusion that it must have been about a woman (instead of its banal real cause, which was squabbling about who’d drunk most whiskey from Captain Puffin’s bottle). And it’s only a small step from there to conclude that the pair must have been preparing to fight a duel… over her!

Spreading the word Yes, Miss Mapp leaps to the hilariously inapt conclusion that the two men must have been fighting a duel over her. It would be moderately comic if she just harboured this heroic misconception to herself and acted accordingly but instead, this being Tilling, and a Benson novel, she has to let everyone know and sets out on a campaign the next morning to accidentally-on-purpose bump into all the usual characters in the high street, and one by one take them into her confidence about the true nature of the duel i.e. her. This ramifies out for a bit before, with comic inevitability, she discovers she most definitely was not the subject of their argument and undergoes yet another self-inflicted humiliation.

Realisation Which triggers more intensive speculation about the real reason both men were seen at Tilling railway station at 6.30 on that fateful morning. And then she has the breakthrough and realises they were both running away. Far from being the heroic men of action she had painted them in her ‘duelling over her’ narrative, now they appear as two lily-livered weaklings. Once again she sallies forth to spread the gossip, buttonholing everyone she meets.

Daily gossip For the nature of Tilling gossip (or of this narrative) is that the best way to quash a rumour or news which humiliates you (the clashing dresses, the secret hoarding, the ‘they were fighting over me’ fiasco) is to replace it with an even juicier piece of gossip. And so she sallies forth again and tells Diva who is gossip on legs and soon the two men’s arrant cowardice is universally known.

By eleven o’clock that morning, the two duellists were universally known as ‘the cowards’, the Padre alone demurring, and being swampingly outvoted. (p.181)

With the result that when they arrive back from their morning golf they find themselves greeted by everyone with fake smiles and ironic references to early morning trains. So that it doesn’t take long for the pair to realise they’re secret is out and for them, in their turn, to consider how to win back Tilling opinion.

Anthropology

And so it rolls on: an endless list of incidents and events which each trigger intense scrutiny from, in particular, Miss Mapp and her frenemy Diva Plaistow, which give rise to feverish speculation and whispered gossip, generally leading to heroic misconceptions or campaigns, which result in the protagonist (generally Miss Mapp’s) very public humiliation; before everyone gets up the next morning and prepares for another day of warfare.

There’s serious articles to be written about the Mapp and Lucia novels viewed through the prism of anthropology, a Darwinian take on status and hierarchy in primate groups, a small clan riven by unending competition and minute analysis of everyone else’s actions and possible motives, an over-attention which converts everyone – in Benson’s comically hyperbolic style – into an analyst, strategist, campaigner and diplomat.

My quick view would be that Benson’s novels demonstrate how immensely overpowered our brains are for most of the situations we find ourselves in. I find myself using the modern phrase ‘over-thinking’ quite a lot at work but, in a sense, don’t all humans over-think everything? Life is pretty simple and yet you only need two people (in a relationship, say) and already you have a world of misunderstandings and confusions; add in one more, then another, then another, and you quickly have a chaos of misunderstandings, misconceptions, mixed messages and so on, and you are in Bensonworld.

Benson has put his finger on something very profound about human nature and created these big (the novels are all quite long and pretty dense) comic edifices out of human beings’ fatal tendency to over-think more or less everything.

And so on…

This takes us up to about page 200 of this 270-page long book. There’s more, as the season moves from high summer into the autumn, on to rainy winter, through an eventful Christmas and on into the new year, namely:

– A reprise of the dress war, wherein Miss Mapp and Diva yet again humiliatingly appear at social events with matching outfits:

Over the background of each mind was spread a hatred of the other, red as their tea-gowns, and shot with black despair as to what on earth they should do now with those ill-fated pieces of pride.

– The arrival of Mr Wyse’s sister, the grand Contessa, from Italy, on page 215, and all the ripples that causes. Mostly because she is completely uninhibited, speaks her mind about everything and is generally free of the terribly English curtain-twitching restraints all the ladies have imposed upon themselves:

Miss Mapp’s head was in a whirl. The Contessa said in the loudest possible voice all that everybody else only whispered. (p.232)

– And Mrs Poppit and Mr Wyse falling in love! with the vast scope for gossip and anticipation and misunderstanding which this entails.

– And, right at the end, a tragic and unexpected loss.

All embroidered at every stage, with the wild speculations, detailed analyses, cunning plans and clever strategising of Miss Mapp and various other Tillingites. But I’ll stop my summary here. There’s plenty more in the same vein, and you can read it online (link below).

Prose style

P.G. Wodehouse achieves his comic effects with a prose style which is as light and airy as his brainless characters. Benson is the exact opposite. His style is heavy and clotted and dense in order to reflect his characters’ never-ending scheming and plotting. His paragraphs can sometimes take up a whole page and his sentences can be very long, made up of numerous sub-clauses. Here’s just one sentence from early in the text:

General manœuvres in Tilling, the gradual burstings of fluttering life from the chrysalis of the night, the emergence of the ladies of the town with their wicker-baskets in their hands for housekeeping purchases, the exodus of men to catch the 11.20 a.m. steam-tram out to the golf links, and other first steps in the duties and diversions of the day, did not get into full swing till half-past ten, and Miss Mapp had ample time to skim the headlines of her paper and indulge in chaste meditations about the occupants of these two houses, before she need really make herself alert to miss nothing.

Much information has to be fitted in, and in a way which reflects the cluttered, busy, even hectic physical activities of the town and mental activities of its key inhabitants. Here’s a description of all Mrs Poppit’s guests maliciously wanting her to carry on talking about receiving her MBE so that she reveals herself as not understanding Tilling’s values of discretion and understatement

One reason for this, of course, as already indicated, was that they all longed for her to expose herself as much as she possibly could, for if there was a quality – and, indeed, there were many – on which Tilling prided itself, it was on its immunity from snobbishness: there were, no doubt, in the great world with which Tilling concerned itself so little kings and queens and dukes and Members of the Order of the British Empire; but every Tillingite knew that he or she (particularly she) was just as good as any of them, and indeed better, being more fortunate than they in living in Tilling…

Benson’s cluttered prose bespeaks an older, Victorian cast of mind, heavy and heavily decorated, ornate and over-furnished – except that instead of earnest Victorian moralising, Benson deploys it for comic purposes, each qualifying clause adding to the exquisite precision with which he itemises the micro-snobberies and mini aggressions of his venomous ladies.

Camp

Benson was gay. A lot of the famous fans who signed a petition to his publishers to republish the Mapp and Lucia novels after his death (in 1940) were themselves gay writers who loved the deeply camp, exaggerated bitchiness of all the characters.

My wife read the books when at school and tells me she never believed they were about women, bearing no relation to the women she knew in her household or extended family, at school or anywhere else. To her, it all read as gay male camp bitchiness. I’m no expert, so I’ll go along with her view. For me the comic bitchiness and endless rivalry is adequately embedded in the women characters, if that makes sense. It’s only very rarely that Benson applies even the minutest hint of campness to any of the male characters who are, by and large, solidly heterosexual e.g. the blustering major and quarrelsome captain and well-meaning vicar. Algernon Wyse is the exception that proves the general rule.

Without being in the least effeminate, Mr. Wyse this morning looked rather like a modern Troubadour. He had a velveteen coat on, a soft, fluffy, mushy tie which looked as if made of Shirley poppies, very neat knickerbockers, brown stockings with blobs, like the fruit of plane trees, dependent from elaborate ‘tops’, and shoes with a cascade of leather frilling covering the laces.

Why mention effeminacy at all unless, unconsciously, to draw attention to it?

Curiosity

The books can be seen as a reflection on the very human failing of curiosity, raised to a kind of pathological intensity, whipped up into a pathological and damaging obsession, and all the funnier for it.

[Miss Mapp’s] face was of high vivid colour and was corrugated by chronic rage and curiosity.

In spite of her malignant curiosity and her cancerous suspicions about all her friends…

Miss Mapp was seething with excitement, curiosity and rage…

The Padre was bursting with curiosity, but since his delicacy forbade him to ask any of the questions which effervesced like sherbet round his tongue, he propounded another plan.

Until she arrived at some sort of information, the excruciating pangs of curiosity that must be endured could be likened only to some acute toothache of the mind with no dentist to stop or remove the source of the trouble…

Curiosity rushed like a devastating tornado across Miss Mapp’s mind, rooting up all other growths, buffeting her with the necessity of knowing what the two whom she had been forced to leave in the garden were doing now…

Sometimes she took him into a shop in case there might be someone there who had not seen him yet on her leash; sometimes she left him on the pavement in a prominent position, marking, all the time, just as if she had been a clinical thermometer, the feverish curiosity that was burning in Tilling’s veins.

1920s slang

‘Ho! That’s how you got the idea then,’ said Diva. ‘I knew you had cribbed it from me.’
‘Cribbed?’ asked Miss Mapp, in ironical ignorance of what so vulgar and slangy an expression meant.
‘Cribbed means taking what isn’t yours,’ said Diva.

After the duel that never was, the gossips of Tilling hope:

that the whole affair was not, in the delicious new slang phrase of the Padre’s, which was spreading like wildfire through Tilling, a ‘wash-out‘. (p.126)

Used later:

Puffin said, ‘But I don’t see what you’re in such a taking about. We’re no worse off than we were before we got a reputation for being such fire-eaters. Being fire-eaters is a wash-out, that’s all. Pleasant while it lasted, and now we’re as we were.’ (p.184)

American slang:

Was there not some sort of corn called pop-corn, which Americans ate? (p.128)

And our old friend ‘cat’, meaning bitchy gossipy woman, which I first came across widespread in the works of Noel Coward.

Puffin yawned. ‘Mapp’s a cat,’ he said. ‘Stroke a cat and you’ll get scratched. Shy a brick at a cat, and she’ll spit at you and skedaddle.’

Lolz

In the church at Christmastime, Miss Mapp:

sat in her usual seat close below the pulpit, and the sun streaming in through a stained glass window opposite made her face of all colours, like Joseph’s coat. Not knowing how it looked from outside, she pictured to herself a sort of celestial radiance coming from within, though Diva, sitting opposite, was reminded of the iridescent hues observable on cold boiled beef. (p.241)

Credit

‘Miss Mapp’ by E.F. Benson was published by Hutchinson in 1922. Page references are to the 1984 Black Swan paperback edition.

Related links

Mapp and Lucia reviews

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by Simon on November 10, 2025  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on November 10, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/11/10/miss-mapp-e-f-benson/

Axël by Villiers de L’Isle-Adam (1890)

Villiers de L’Isle-Adam (1838 to 1889) had a long disastrously unsuccessful career, living in poverty for much of the time, despite churning out numerous plays, novels, stories and articles. A hard core of friends and supporters relished his heavily Symbolist and Decadent stories but the general public never did, during his lifetime. Only in the last few years of his life did he enjoy some success, specifically on publication of his volume of 27 Cruel Tales in 1883 and its follow-up volumes.

Villiers began work on Axël around 1869 after a meeting with his hero, Richard Wagner, who advised him to create an ideal world rather than describe the real one. He continued to work on it for the next 20 years and, although excerpts were published in 1885, it was still unfinished when he died in 1889. After his death the play was edited by his friends, the poet Stéphane Mallarmé and the novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans, and published posthumously in 1890.

Axël is a long play, a philosophical drama designed to be read rather than staged. Villiers considered it his masterpiece although critical opinion places far higher value on his fiction. It was in 1885 and 1886 that the word ‘symbolism’ came to be used to describe the group of young writers led by Mallarme, Verlaine and Villiers and Axel came to be regarded by Villiers and his friends as a peak expression of their views, subject and methods. In the translator’s foreword, Marilyn Gaddis Rose says Axel is the Symbolist play par excellence and yet, by using every possible Symbolist theme and cranking them all up to maximum, she says Villiers defeated his object. It became so top heavy with symbols that it collapses under its own weight. Rose says it is more like an academic demonstration piece than a play.

The play is in four parts with several sub-divisions:

Part 1. The Religious World

  1. And compel them to come in
  2. The Renunciatrix

Part 2. The Tragic World

  1. Watchmen of the Sovereign Secret
  2. The Story of Herr Zacharias
  3. The Exterminator

Part 3. The Occult World

  1. At the Threshold
  2. The Renunciator

Part 4. The Passional World

  1. Trial by Gold and Love
  2. The Supreme Option

There are two central characters, representing the male and female principles, Axël and Sara.

Act 1. The Religious World (31 pages)

Act 1 (The Religious World) describes in minute detail the preparations in the darkened chapel of a Catholic convent in Flanders for the ordination of Sara, a 23-year-old foundling, her official initiation into the sorority of nuns. (Her full and highly symbolic name is Eve Sara Emmanuele, Princess of Maupers, p.27.)

Long speeches by the Abbess reveal various facts including that Sara is set to inherit much wealth which will come to the convent if she formally joins; but that she has proven difficult and obstinate. These doubts about her are fully justified when, after a vast amount of verbiage from the Abbess and ceremonial Latin from the Archdeacon, at the first point where she has to indicate her willingness to join, Sara utters the single word ‘No’ (p.31).

The entire convent is thrown into chaos, the Abbess wailing, her fellow nuns lamenting. When they’ve exited the Archdeacon unleashes long speeches about how she must renounce the flesh in order to become one with God etc and opens the vault of the founder where, he implies, she ought to be locked in to ponder her sins, but instead Sara seizes a huge axe, placed in the chapel as a votive offering and forces the old man down into the vault, then slams the stone lids shot in him. Opens the chapel windows so that wind and snow blow in, extinguishing the holy lamps. She tears a long pall into two strips, ties one end of it to a bar across the window, then climbs out, lowering herself down the pall out of sight, and so escapes the convent.

This is the rejection of religious commitment.

In Act 2. The Tragic World (77 pages)

I was expecting the ‘play’ to continue in the same overwrought, intense, religiose atmosphere of the first act, so Act 2 comes as a surprise. It opens to reveal that we are in the hall of a grand castle in Germany, somewhere in the Black Forest and introduces us to three of Axel’s loyal retainers (Gotthold, Miklaus, Hartwig who lost an arm in the wars), tall old men, some wearing old military uniforms bearing the Iron Cross. They are tidying up the grand hall, bickering, joking, reminiscing and giving us the backstory to their master, the central figure of the play.

This is that their master, the Count Axël of Auersperg, German prince, inherited the castle and estates when his father, Count Gherard of Auersperg, died just after the end of the Napoleonic wars i.e. 1815. The very day of Gherard’s death, a relative named Janus arrived and, when the will was read, it turned out that this Janus was given the baby Axel to raise (p.49). Now, 20 years have passed (so it’s about 1835) and the young Count, still supervised by the spookily unageing Janus, has recently been visited by a guest, Commander Kaspar.

At this precise moment, as Act 2 starts, Axël is out hunting, although the three retainers point out the sky clouding over and a storm blowing in. The three old men are interrupted by the arrival of Axël’s young servant, Ukko, who ought to be accompanying their lord. He says Axël is fine and has taken shelter from the storm in a cave. He’s mainly concerned to tell them that out in the woods he came across a pretty maiden, Luisa, who turns out to the daughter of Hans Glück the ranger, he wooed her, asked her father for her hand, and they are now engaged (p.53).

Barely has he finished his excitable account of all this before tall, lordly Commander Kaspar enters, very tall, very noble, about 43. The others pay their respects and exit leaving the Commander to survey the table laid for him and browse Axël’s bookshelves. He soliloquises and what emerges is that he believes his young cousin is falling into bad habits, locked up in this remote place he is taking an unhealthy interest in the occult, Hermeticism, Kabbalism and suchlike (p.56). He needs to be taken in hand, will prove malleable, will make a splash if presented at court where he’d be a hit with the ladies and ‘could win for me with the king certain influences’ (p.57).

Key fact: Kaspar has been staying at the caste for 8 days and this evening, after dinner, plans to leave, to ride 8 miles or so to a nearby village, overnight there, and catch a coach to Berlin the next morning.

The story of Herr Zacharias

He is musing how to manage Axël’s chamberlain, Herr Zacharias, when the latter enters and declares he has an important revelation to make. With a great deal of historical detail he tells the mystery of Axël’s father who, when the French invaded the German states during the Napoleonic War, was put in charge of a military convoy assigned to carry the nation’s wealth in gold ingots (‘eighty munitions wagons of the National Bank of Frankfurt, 400 casks of coin and gold bars, caissons of precious stones) to a safe place in the country. The conventional account has it that they were ambushed by the French and killed but Zacharias has a new, conspirator version, which is that the father decoyed the convoy deep into the Black Forest round this castle and buried it in a secret underground chamber. It was as he and his fellow officers were rejoining the convoy that they were ambushed and killed. But Zacharias himself was here, at the castle, when Count Gherard appeared suddenly, to visit his pregnant wife, Countess Lisvia of Auersperg, for a hurried kiss and farewell, before he rode off to his death. So somewhere near the castle is untold wealth which, due to complicated legal matters which he goes into, no longer belongs to anyone. I.e. finders keepers.

He revealed all this to his master, Lord Axël, but the latter made him and the others with him at that moment, all swear an oath of silence on the matter, and that was three years ago.

Enter Axël

Commander Kaspar is just about to enquire more when the protagonist of the play, Axël, finally makes his appearance. The servants reappear and serve Kaspar and Axël a sumptuous dinner. Over this meal (wild boar with red pepper and vanilla) Kaspar starts to make the pitch which is, as I understand it, the heart of this act, namely to persuade him to leave his self-imposed exile and return with Kaspar to the Court with its ‘merriment, luxury and love’. Kaspar goes on to describe the pleasure of having affairs at court, specifically how half the fun of ‘conquering’ a woman is knowing that her husband is driven mad with jealousy. Axël is visibly disgusted with all this.

(A notable aspect of the play is the use of asides. I’m used to this from Shakespearian and Restoration drama but it’s odd encountering it here, in a supposedly modern play. Thus the Commander is continually indicated as making asides [To himself]. I might be mistaken but I think that in one of these he implies that, as they ride together through the dark forest, he will shoot Axël and so inherit his estate and wealth. Another obvious aspect of these sometimes very long asides, is that the other characters have to hang around waiting while the character delivers their long aside, pretending they can neither near nor see them doing so. Bringing out what a very undramatic playwright Villiers was.]

So if Act 1 centred on the Archdeacon’s extended speeches using a variety of arguments to prove the value of the religious life, the servants now leave these two men alone and Kaspar embarks on a panoply of arguments to draw Axël from his reclusive life, studying esoteric knowledge under the mysterious Mater Janus, and instead:

‘Imitate me. Seize life…without illusions and without weakness,’ (p.82)

He gives a few more illustrations of how rewarding life at court is, before he decides to reveal what Herr Zacharias has revealed to him about the supposedly buried treasure. He calmly confesses that he himself is penniless but if they hire workers to dig in the castle grounds he will be happy to split the treasure when they find it 50/50.

Axël calls Herr Zacharias and very solemnly accuses him of breaking his oath and telling.

Next, to my astonishment, Axël calls his page, Ukko, and tells him to fetch the three old servants and bring two swords. Then, while Kaspar is still rambling on about h is dreams of sudden wealth and life of pleasure at court, Axël announces that Kaspar has mortally insulted him and he is challenging him to a duel. He ceases to be a guest in his home, this big hall will make a fair duelling ground, he indicates parchment and quill which he can use to write his will and that one of them will not leave the hall alive.

Kaspar is as amazed and surprised as the audience. Initially he thinks, like us, that it’s some kind of joke but it isn’t He sarcastically suggests that all guests to the castle be warned of the fatal consequences of staying there, but no jokes, pleas or expressions of outrage deter Axël and so they prepare to fight a duel. For full Gothic effect the storm has picked up again and the fight is illuminated by lightning and thunder.

BUT…some of the Commander’s words strike a chord with Axël’s servants. He sees them hesitate and so…in a move much criticised by all the play’s audiences and readers. Villiers has Axël put down his sword and launch a very long defence of his actions and the text turns into something more like a courtroom scene than an action movie.

For now Axël speaks at very great length, for well over 20 pages, to a series of accusations:

  • he refutes the Commander’s accusation that he wants to keep the gold for himself, claiming that a) he doesn’t know where it is b) he doesn’t want it or need it
  • the Commander accused him of keeping it from the State but Axël says it was the ‘State’ which sent his father to his doom and whose official histories accused his father of ineptness and dereliction of duty; he owes the Sate nothing

There is an interesting passage about language in which Axël says that the words they use are avatars or epitomes of their users and so the words Kaspar uses are gross and base like their speaker and so have nothing in common with the way Axël uses the same words. Can’t help thinking that would be fertile matter for poets like Mallarmé and Valéry.

The final 4 or 5 pages take a surprisingly martial turn for a character who is, I thought, intended to be so otherworldly and spiritual. He surprises the Commander by saying that if the State did send a force against him they would be massacred. He commands the loyalty of all the villages round and all the fit young men (20,000 foresters) who would fight for him. The rough terrain with its close-packed trees would block the advance of any army while his guerrillas picked it off. The crenellations of his castle are designed to host 48 cannon which would massacre any forces coming within two leagues. If a smaller force was sent they would be ripped to shred by his pack of psychotic Ulm hounds. He even declares the miners of the region are loyal to him and still very resentful of the forced conscription which sent them to war and so some of them would happily undertake a mission to assassinate the king. After a couple of such assassinations ‘the State’ would call off its attack on Axël.

So you can see why I was very surprised that the character I thought was going to be a mimsy aesthete and sensitive poet turns out to be a touchy, aggressive warlord who dreams of midnight attacks on the sleeping army which would result in ‘simple, thorough slaughter’ (p.114). He would set the forest on fire to roast an attacking army. In winter he would use landslides and the release of cunningly placed boulders. Survivors and deserters would be picked off one by one before they managed to escape the forest. At which point Axël’s forces would storm out of the forest and attack the nearest towns, thus triggering a civil war right across Germany. It’s an extraordinarily apocalyptic vision.

Or, they could leave this mild eccentric alone to his studies. But now he gestures to the Commander to pick up his sword. By this point, after this long rhodomontade, Kaspar, like the audience, knows that Axël isn’t kidding.

So they sword fight and Villiers describes it in some detail, the lights flashing off the blades etc, in a very cinematic style, Kaspar doing all the attacking, Axël impassively defending, till the latter sees an opening and with one quick thrust, runs Kaspar through the heart. He falls to the floor and dies without a word. Axël thanks his retainers for their faith, and orders them to take the body down to the vaults to bury.

At this moment, the mystery figure of Axël’s mentor, Master Janus, tall, 50, silver-haired, appears at the top of the steps at the back of the hall, a hieratic figure with a face like an Assyrian relief.

Comment

Axël’s very long speech which makes up the second half of this act and forms a long hiatus between the challenge to a duel and the duel itself, has led to much criticism. The translator, Marilyn Rose, describes it as possibly the most boring second act in all drama while even W.B. Yeats, a fan who tried to get the work staged in London, admitted in his preface to the 1924 translation that the second act ‘dragged greatly’.

I found this true of the first part which consists of a legalistic defence Axël’s right to the supposed treasure in which he gives various definitions of ‘the State’ and its obligations or lack thereof to him and his family – but I found his description of the castle’s defences against any form of attack, which escalates into the vision of launching a countrywide civil war, completely unexpected and surprisingly vivid. Much more practical and imaginable than the tedious religiosity of Act 1.

It’s taken quite a long time, but this act amounts to the rejection of the world, of fleshly pleasure, gold and power.

In Act 3. The Occult World (17 pages)

In line with the highly staged and schematic nature of the work, Act 3 consists entirely of a dialogue in which the Magus, Master Janus, lectures Axël on how to escape the world of Becoming into the world of Being. It follows immediately from the previous scene and starts with the voodoo idea that the vapour from Kaspar’s blood, which is still lying on a pool on the floor of the hall, has enveloped Axël, he has breathed it in along with the worldly instincts of its owner, and it has revived his worldly feelings and dragged him back to earth. He feels curious about the Gold which he hasn’t done for years.

In his ten page lecture Master Janus uses all manner of metaphors and occult language. Some of this made sense to me, some of it seemed like wordy gibberish, a few thoughts or phrases really struck home. Here’s an example of the boilerplate, stock, standard rhetoric of the mystic of all philosophies and religions, echoing the sentiments of the Stoics as summarised by Cicero or Marcus Aurelius:

‘The Law is the energy of beings! It is the living, free, substantial Notion in which the realms of the Seen and the Unseen moves, animates, immobilises or transforms the totality of all becoming…You originate in the Immemorial.’ (p.128)

Elsewhere he says something which resonated with me:

‘If what passes or changes worth remembering? What would you like to remember?’ (p.125)

I have plenty of regrets. I fantasise about the Buddhist ideal of achieving total release from all worldly ties and attachments. If only…. A little later Janus says:

‘He alone is free who has opted forever, that is, who can no longer be tempted and is no longer compelled to hesitate.’ (p.129)

At school we endlessly discussed existentialism, Catholicism, Kierkegaard, Hesse, Eastern philosophies, the leap of faith. The Sartrean idea that you are absolutely free to make your choices and your choices decide who you are, trumped by the notion of many faiths that once you have committed everything becomes clear and simple. No further agonising required. The Act is full of ideas like this.

As to the stagecraft, something pretty dramatic happens halfway through which is that the storm which has been rumbling along in the background, and intensified during the duel scene, suddenly leaps in intensity, as a bold of lightning crashes through a window and streaks across the hall as a sheet of flame, darting past the arms hanging on the old medieval wall until it strikes the fireplace and carves a furrow in it. Pretty impressive if this could be staged. As impossible as some of Wagner’s stage directions.

Anyway, this doesn’t have the shattering effect on the two protagonists as you might imagine, not least because Master Janus goes over to the shattered window, opens it and, as if by magic, the storm calms, the air clears, the night becomes serene as if ‘under a calm enchantment.’

Anyway Master Janus’s long mystical lecture reaches a climax when he asks Axël whether he accepts ‘Light, Hope and Life’ to which Axël, like Sara in the parallel moment in Act 1, replies quietly with one little word, No.

This is the rejection of the world of the occult.

Janus has half a page saying that Axël therefore commits to becoming more ensnared in earthly chains before being superseded because Gotthold enters to say that two of the other servants encountered a stagecoach on the road to the castle, found its occupant to be a young woman dressed in mourning, and that she is even now being taken to a spare bedroom.

Now, back at the start of Act 3 Janus had confided a prediction to the audience:

‘The Hour has come – she too is going to come, she who renounced ideal Divinity for the secret of the Gold…here then face to face the final duality of the two races I chose from the depths of the ages that simple and virginal humanity might conquer the twofold illusion of Gold and Love – that is, to found in a point of Becoming the virtue of a new Sign.’ (p.124)

Well, now she (Sara) has arrived and in fact is seen progressing along the back of the stage following a servant carrying a candle, while Janus closes the act with these portentous words:

‘The Veil and the Mantle, both renunciators, have intersected: the Work nears fulfilment.’ (p.139)

Ah. All is as foretold. Jolly good.

Act 4. The Passional World (32 pages)

Act four moves scene to be set in the vast castle vault, packed with statues of the family dead, with a hanging censer. The servants have buried Kaspar and are just preparing a cross for him. As at the start of Act 2, the atmosphere is lightened with some banter between the three old retainers (Gotthold, Hartwig, Miklaus) who have some respect for the dead Kaspar, and young Ukko who is so dismissive and disrespectful it makes the old men angry.

Enter Axël in travelling clothes. He tells the retainers he is leaving early the next morning and they react with incredulity and tears, especially young Ukko, who he astonishes by saying that, if he doesn’t return, the estate will be his. Tears and laments but then they slowly exit the vault leaving Axël alone and he forbids them to return. When you think about it, this is odd. Surely he should go to bed or some such. Leaving him down in the vault feels very staged to allow Axël not to leave but (in the event) to do away with himself.

What happens first is that while Axël is pondering he hears footsteps, hides, and sees Sara enter the vault. She goes over to the big escutcheon at one end and applies the point of the dagger she’s holding. As in hundreds of movies about secret treasure, at the touch of the dagger in the right spot the entire wall starts to sink and reveals a long ark vault and…a huge treasure of diamonds and other jewels, along with gold coins, comes flowing and tumbling over her and into the hall.

Axël emerges from hiding and makes to approach her, but quick as a flash she pulls two pistols from her belt, Lara Croft style, and shoots at him, twice, he dodges so her bullets only graze his chest.

Axël continues on towards her, grabs her hand with the dagger and is on the verge of stabbing her when he sees her face for the first time and hesitates. Huh. I thought the play was going to be a love story of sorts but it turns out nothing like it. 1) These two characters spend most of the play apart and only meet for these last 20 pages and 2) their first reaction is to try to shoot or stab each other.

In that voodoo Liebestod manner patented by Wagner, they don’t talk about love but about death, about trying to kill each other, how only one of them can survive etc in a quite psychopathic way.

‘From now on, my senses tell me, knowing you are alive would keep me from living! That is why I crave the sight of your lifeless body. And, whether or not you understand, I am going to become your executioner…’ (p.154)

However Sara deflects this by unleashing a torrent of erotic rhetoric at which Axël melts, sits her on the ebony sofa, kneels at her feet.

‘I know the secret of infinite pleasures and delectating cries, the secret of voluptuous sensations where every hope expires.’ (p.155)

‘Beneath your night-hued hair you are like an ideal lily, blooming in tenebrae. What quiverings rise at the right of you, my love?’

Sara tells Axël she grew up in a convent where she was mistreated and miserable and he immediately vows to raze it to the ground so she has to talk him out of that.

Sara tells Axël the story of plucking a rose from a rose bush in the winter snows, a story designed to evoke the Rosicrucians, very popular at the time.

Then Sara spends 3 or 4 pages giving exotic orientalising descriptions of exotic destinations around the Mediterranean and into the Far East which they could visit together.

The windows of the vault lighten as dawn comes, at the same time they hear Axël’s retainers singing a sad song about their master leaving.

But then Axël is stricken with an insight. He startles Sara by saying none of her visions will happen because they have just fulfilled them by imagining them. How could any reality live up to the ecstatic visions of this wonderful night?

‘If we accepted life now, we would commit a sacrilege against ourselves. As for living, our servants will do that for us.’ (p.170)

So this famous quote comes in the context of Axël realising that Reality can never live up to their ecstatic imaginings of it.

‘Satiated for all eternity, let us rise from the table and in all justice let us leave to ordinary mortals whose ill-fated nature can measure the value of realities only by sensation, the task of picking up the banquet crumbs. I have thought too much to stoop to act.’

From this he goes on to ask whether they want to experience all the maladies that ordinary mortals do, growing old and disappointment, old age and boredom. Sara realises he is justifying suicide, to cease now, at their moment of highest ecstasy and anticipation.

All the wonderful exotic places she listed? In reality they are piles of rubble and paupers.

‘You have thought them? That is enough, do not look at them. The earth…is swollen like a brilliant bubble with misery and deceit…Let us get away from her, completely! Violently!’ (p.171)

Sara hesitates and gives half a dozen reasons not to die which Axël (rather unconvincingly) refutes. So the tips the poison granules from the emerald ring she wears into a jewel-encrusted goblet Axël brings her, then he takes it up to a window and (rather impractically) captures the morning dew in it.

Then, as they hear the Chorus of the Woodsmen celebrating the arrival of dawn (as in an opera). Alongside it they hear the marriage song of young Ukko marrying the ranger’s daughter and Axël asks Sara to give the young couple their blessing. Then with a last few lyrical words, the pair drink from the goblet and die in each other’s arms, as the sun finally rises and we hear:

distant murmurs of the wind in the forest vastness, vibrations of the awakening of space, the surge of the plain, the hum of life. (p.175)

Thoughts

Obviously it’s a long, wordy, undramatic, wild farrago of ideas and images. Only at a few isolated moments does it become something like a believable depiction of human beings: in some of the early exchanges between the Abbess and Archdeacon, but most of all in the banter between the three old retainers at the start of acts 2 and 4. Kaspar’s disbelief when Axël abruptly challenges him to a duel suddenly has a human dimension. And Axël’s long description of the military precautions he’d taken to defend the castle, although over the top, is at least understandable.

For the rest it is very like the hieratic, static, stagey, work of symbolic drama of legend. Axël and Sara are both allegorical figures and symbols of something. This doesn’t trouble me. At university I studied allegories such as Gawayne and the Green Knight, Piers Plowman and the Pilgrim’s Progress. From that perspective, Axël is not allegorical enough. In acts 1 and 3, I felt the presentation of Christian theology and the mystical doctrines of the occult were not presented powerfully enough. The speeches of the Archdeacon and of Master Janus were just that, speeches made up of tissues of doctrine and rhetoric, rather than actions which fully dramatised the worldviews which Sara and Axël, respectively, reject.

Similarly, I was surprised that the section devoted to Commander Kaspar talking about life at court was so short, that Axël interrupted him fairly quickly by telling him how much he had insulted him (Axël) and challenging him to a duel. Surprised because I thought there would be more, in a Decadent play, about the life of the senses, about sensual pleasure, that it would be more fully worked out and detailed, than Kaspar simply saying it’s a lot of fun to seduce people’s wives at court.

I think what I’m saying is that, although all the acts are very wordy, they somehow fail to really bring out the essence of the three worldviews Villiers is schematically depicting. He accumulates arguments into great diatribes rather than selecting the key one or two, which would have been more focused, more dramatic.

In passing, I was expecting from summaries and references to the play, that the two protagonists, Axël and Sara, engage in an extended love affair, that the play is about their love but, as you can see from my summary, this is far from being the case. Sara only has one word to say in the first 31 pages and then disappears for 118 pages, only reappearing on page 149. It’s only in the last 20 or so pages that they are together on stage.

Obviously, the way they go from cheerfully wanting to murder each other to becoming besottedly in love with each other, unable to leave each other, so saturatedly in love that Axël comes to realise the rest of their lives can only be a pitiful anticlimax after this night of intense union, is so off-the-scale unreal as to be beyond comical and into the realm of high-pitched music-drama, Wagnerian opera which there’s no point applying common sense to, which is intended to sweep you up into a world of primal emotions beyond logic or sense, and I think it successfully does this.

Lastly, looking just at the end, it is thought provoking how this entire approach – rejecting religion, worldly pleasure, sex, wealth and success, and then the lures of occult mystical philosophy – leaves the characters, in the end, with only one option, to do away with themselves and leave the world altogether. In the darkened world of the auditorium, stunned by a succession of melodramatic scenes, special effects, weeping nuns, murdered soldiers and sheets of lightning, I can imagine this working, in dramatic context i.e. under the spell of everything which came before.

But at the same time, when the play ends, you emerge out into the light of day, blinking and dazed, and realise it has nothing to do with your life, with anyone’s life. That is both its strength, as a piece of achingly contrived artifice, a deliberate rejection of every aspect of tedious everyday existence, and its obvious weakness, because a suicide pact is not really a very practical philosophy of life.

As Axël deploys his case for suicide I couldn’t help thinking of Albert Camus’s famous book-length argument against suicide, The Myth of Sisyphus, written almost exactly fifty years later (1890/1942). I don’t really know enough about the full breadth of French literature, but I wonder if you could say that Camus, in part, answering the question de L’Isle-Adam put half a century earlier.

Finally, I’ve been reading the quotation, ‘As for living, our servants will do that for us’ for 40 years or more, and have finally got round to reading it in context. For all that time I imagined it expressed the splendid confidence of an Oscar Wilde-type character, drolly, ironically, aristocratically superior. Comic. Now I see it is something quite different. It is the almost contemptuous, disdainful comment of a character arguing the case for joint suicide. Not so comically droll after all. They are the words of someone who’s become fanatically convinced that the only way forward is to kill himself. Not at all what I’ve believed all these years…

The translation

If the work is a masterpiece of French Symbolist prose that doesn’t come over one little bit in this translation, which captures the overwrought vocabulary but without the slightest trace of magic. All too often the translation has only half removed from the original French, retaining the original syntax so as to appear thoroughly foreign in word order and rhythm.

However, by what so advantageous subjects of idle conversation do you so often replace the interest which these other subjects, perhaps, encompass…

Really, however insignificant the object of my favourite studies might be in your judgement, one can hardly see in what respect I have gained in exchange this evening by listening to you. (p.91)

Whether it’s Villiers, Rose or both to blame, a lot of the translation is clunky, clumsy and, because of this, unmemorable and sometimes hard to follow.

Credit

I read ‘Axël’ in the translation by Marilyn Gaddis Rose published by the Soho Book Company in 1986.

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The Aeneid by Virgil – books 10 to 12

Book 10 Pallas and Mezentius

A mighty conference of the gods is called on Mount Olympus. Jupiter is puzzled why war has broken out. Aeneas’s mother, Venus, makes a long complaint, saying the Trojans have faithfully done everything they were asked to, and yet Aeolus sank them in his storms, Iris drove the women mad on Sicily and now Allecto has come up from hell to stir up war. For heaven’s sake, please can he at least spare her grandson, Ascanius?

Juno, Jupiter’s wife and inveterate opponent of Aeneas and the Trojans, replies, twisting the truth and making it all look like the impious Trojans’ fault, denying that any Fates told him to come to Italy and blaming him for starting the war. Juno blames Venus for starting the entire thing when she helped Paris to abduct Menelaus’s lawful bride, Helen. She should have thought about her precious Trojans then. And now the Trojans are doing the same again, same as Paris, coming to a foreign country and ravishing away women pledged to local fiancées.

For the root of the war between the natives and Aeneas and the Trojans is that King Latinus, king of the area around the Tiber, has one daughter Lavinia and she had for some time been promised to virile young Turnus, king of the neighbouring Rutuli. But when Aeneas and his men arrive at his court, the king is warned by prophecies that he should break that marriage arrangement and give his daughter to the newcomer. Turnus is, understandably, enraged. And so the cause of the massacre and bloodshed which dominates the second half of the Aeneid is this fighting over a royal princess, and the rights to territory, inheritance, breeding and lineage which she represents. Obviously poor Lavinia has little or no say in the matter but, like Helen, can only watch helplessly as the strong men around her launch a prolonged and ruinous war.

Anyway, after Juno’s speech has muddied the issues, all the gods burst out in confused opinions until Jupiter silences them all and says he’s not interested in the rights and wrongs of the affair: he washes his hands of it. Let each man face his fortune. The Fates will find a way. Then he nods and the earth shakes, which is his way of making a final decision, and the conference of gods breaks up.

Back on earth, the Trojans are desperately defending their camp against the fierce attack of the besieging Rutulians. Meanwhile Aeneas has left them to sail north to meet the Etruscans led by King Tarchon who wants their treacherous former leader, Mezentius (who has fled to join Turnus in his fight against the Trojans) brought to justice. So Aeneas secures the Etruscans as allies. Then their joint fleet sails back south along the coast of Italy to the mouth of the river Tiber to rejoin the battle.

At which point Virgil writes a conventional invocation to the Muses of Mount Helicon, asking their help in describing the names and lineages of all the Etruscan warriors. Catalogue of the Etruscan leaders (the catalogue of warriors was a well known aspect of a good epic poem, as pioneered by Homer in the Iliad).

Aeneas is leading the fleet of the Etruscan allies when they are approached by frolicking nymphs who reveal that they are his former fleet which the goddess changed into sea nymphs. They explain she did this because the Rutulians were about to fire them and go on to tell him his son and the Trojans are in dire straits, besieged in their camp.

As dawn rises Aeneas’s fleet sail up the Tiber and arrive at the camp. He flashes his great shield in the sunlight and the Trojans in the camp roar with delight. The fleet rams into the banks of the river and warriors leap into the shallows or slide down oars to land.

A long passage describing the many Rutulians massacred. Young Pallas speaks to rally the Arcadians, and sets about his own massacres. Eventually Turnus tells all his troops to stand down and back away and walks into an open space for single combat with Pallas. Pallas calls on his city’s god, Hercules, and cast his spear, which breaches Turnus’s armour at the shoulder but only grazes him. Hercules up in heaven weeps. Jupiter tells him every man has his time. Then Turnus throws his spear which pierces Pallas’s shield, armour and chest, and he falls to the ground gouting out his life blood. Turnus stands over him and says his father (Evander) is well rewarded for his hospitality to the invaders.

Pallas’s body is carried back by Arcadians to the camp. Virgil editorialises that Turnus will rue the day he killed Pallas and stole his armour. Hearing of new friend’s son’s death, Aeneas goes on a turbo-charged killing spree, like a raging torrent, like a storm of black wind, killing without mercy, even warriors who clutch his knees and beg.

Meanwhile Juno goes to Jupiter and begs for the life of Turnus. Jupiter grants him a brief respite but says he cannot avoid his ultimate fate. So Juno flies down to the battlefield and creates a phantom effigy of Aeneas. She has Turnus confront him and the phantom Aeneas turn and run. Unable to believe his luck, Turnus sets off in pursuit. Phantom Aeneas jumps onto a ship moored to the bank and Turnus jumps after him but Juno immediately makes the phantom disappear, cuts the ship’s cables and quickly propels it out on the tide.

Meanwhile Aeneas roams the battlefield calling out for Turnus but Turnus is nowhere to be seen. He is on a ship being swept far from the battlefield. He calls out on Father Jupiter, asking why he is being submitted to this disgrace, pleading to be allowed to return to the battlefield, weeping for the humiliation of seeming to have run away in front of his own men and his allies. He tries to jump overboard to swim to shore but Juno prevents him, so then tries to throw himself on his sword, but Juno protects him, too. Eventually the ship touches land up the coast at the ancient city of his father, Daunus (10.689).

Turnus’s place is taken by Mezentius who goes on a similar sadistic killing spree, rejoicing in his power to kill. Pitiless Mars is dealing out death to both sides. The gods look on in pity and grief to see so many fine men suffering.

Finally Aeneas confronts Mezentius. This is Mezentius’s aristeia. The word aristeia is Greek and means ‘excellence’, by extension ‘moment of excellence’ or ‘moment of prowess’ (as Richard Jenkyns puts it, p.10). Greek literary critics analysed and named all aspects of their literary genres, different types of scene or incident or character. An aristeia is a scene in the conventions of epic poetry where a hero in battle has his finest moments (aristos = ‘best’). Very often an aristeia depicts the moment when a warrior both reaches his peak as a fighter but also meets his death at his physical and psychological peak. A climax to his career.

So Mezentius makes a prayer and bravely throws his spear. But it bounces off Aeneas’s shield and kills nearby Antores. Then Aeneas casts his spear which enters Mezentius’s groin. He is limping away as Aeneas closes in but then his son, Lausus, leaps between them. He parries a blow from Aeneas’s sword and all Lausus’s comrades raise a cheer and start pelting Aeneas with rocks and stones. Aeneas ducks and protects himself with his shield biding his time, and then, when the bombardment slackens, buries his sword up to the hilt in the young man’s midriff.

But as he watches Lausus’s beautiful young face bleach white of life, Aeneas is overcome with pity and holds his hand. When he is dead, he turns on Lausus’s colleagues and rails at them.

Meanwhile his father Mezentius is bathing his wound in the river, his armour half off, surrounded by his entourage. He hears lamenting approaching and then his colleagues bring in his dead son’s body on his shield. Mezentius laments that his bad behaviour led to them being exiled and contributed to the death of the only thing valuable to him.

So Mezentius has his horse Rhaebius brought to him, mounts him, and rides into the heart of the battle clutching two javelins. He rides round shouting Aeneas’s name till he confronts him and, riding round him three times, launches spear after spear at him. All these stick in Aeneas’s shield, till he is tired of this and throws his own javelin which hits the horse between the temples and brings it crashing down, pinning Mezentius to the ground.

Dazed, Mezentius, unable to move, makes a last request, that he be properly buried, alongside his son. Then Aeneas runs him through with his sword, and he pours out his life’s breath in wave after wave of blood all over his armour and the narrative just stops with no comment.

Book 11 Drances and Camilla

As so often in Virgil, I found the segue to the next book abrupt and unexplained. The sun is coming up but we never heard of it going down. Aeneas piously sets up the armour of the killed Mezentius, which is described in loving detail, at a shrine. Then he addresses his men at what Virgil calls ‘the hour of their triumph’ and tells them the majority of their work is now over.

None of this quite makes sense. Surely the ‘hour’ of their triumph was the day before when Turnus disappeared and he killed Mezentius? Why wait a night and a calm unfighting morning of hanging up armour before giving this speech?

This is just one of the puzzling places which I suspect Virgil knew he had to come back and adjust and finalise, and explains why he asked his friends to burn the poem.

First Aeneas tells them to bury their dead and he himself turns to address the body of beautiful young dead Pallas: ‘Oh the pity of it.’ Compare Wilfred Owen:

I mean the truth untold:
The pity of war, the pity war distilled.

They place it on a soft wickerwork bier with a green canopy and Aeneas orders a thousand soldiers to escort the body back to his poor old father in a huge procession which includes arms, horses and captives taken from the enemy, Aeneas orders leaders of the army to carry inn their arms ‘tree trunks’ draped in weapons captured from the enemy and inscribed with their names; enemy chariots drenched in Rutulian blood and Pallas’s own warhorse. It is all sent off in a long funeral procession upriver towards Pallantium.

Then Aeneas marches back to the camp and his present concerns. Envoys come from the Latins and ask for a truce to bury their dead. Aeneas delivers a long gracious speech lamenting that it ever came to war, saying he came in peace, saying he could have fought Turnus in single combat to decide everything, but they are all the victims of ‘cruel Fortune’. Or, as the reader knows, Juno’s implacable hate.

Old Drances speaks in reply, saying Aeneas is wise and honourable, he’s never liked Turnus, they will go back to King Latinus and try and make peace. There follow a 12-day truce while both sides roam the hills to cut down trees to make funeral pyres for the dead.

The arrival of the procession at Pallantium. King Evander falls on his body weeping and delivers a long speech. This is a slightly uneasy moment for the poem because the obvious thing to do would be to have him bitterly regret taking Aeneas in and sending his son off to die in a pointless war. Instead Virgil has to tread carefully and make him proud of allying with Aeneas:

I would not wish to blame you, Trojans, nor our treaties, nor regret the joining of our right hands in friendship. (11.165)

And proud his son died in battle, after killing ‘thousands of Volscians’ (11.168). He would not wish his son any other kind of funeral than that of a brave warrior who fell in battle. And he tells the huge processions which has brought his son to return to the fight. And says Aeneas now owes the death of Turnus to him and his son. The logic of war.

Virgil describes a grim day full of burning funeral pyres, the living riding round each pyre three times, wailing, the hecatombs of animals slaughtered, the arms thrown onto the flames, the clamour of men and screaming of dying beasts. A black day of lamentation.

The Latins, on their side, bury their dead, but also build a mound of nameless corpses and burn it. Lamentation in the court of King Latinus where mothers lament the loss of so many sons and call on Turnus to fight it out in single combat. But others speak up for Turnus and his right to Lavinia, led by the queen, a sort of Juno figure.

The Latins had sent an embassy to King Diomede of the Aetolians asking for his help in the war but now they return empty handed. Diomede won’t help. Latinus loses heart. He calls a great council and asks the envoys to repeat what Diomede said. They repeat Diomede’s speech and it is noble and stirring. He describes how the siege of Troy in which he fought took so long solely because of the might of Hector and Aeneas, and the latter was the more pious (a very conscious bigging-up of the founder of Rome). And that the war was impious and that is why all of the Greek survivors have been swept by fate to the four corners of the earth or struck down, like proud Agamemnon, all cursed. He counts himself lucky to have survived, albeit exiled from his homeland, never to see his wife again, and building a new settlement in Italy. Therefore he won’t tempt fate a second time, he will not fight the Trojans again. Instead he advises Latinus to make peace with the Trojans and accept their evident destiny.

King Latinus then laments that they ever got involved in this war. This thought is taken much further by old Drances who, although he speaks for the Trojans, is portrayed as a shifty and sneaky courtier. In another sudden, unexpected and unexplained Jump, it now appears that Turnus – who we last saw raging aboard the ship Juno had lured him onto and being swept out at sea, before making landfall up the coast at the ancient city of his father, Daunus (10.689) – Turnus has magically reappeared in the court of King Latinus. This isn’t impossible or unlikely – obviously he’d make his way back to base. It’s just odd that it goes completely undescribed and even remarked on. Virgil makes no mention of his return journey, just as the very end of book 6 is strangely throwaway – in a dozen or so words Virgil tells us Aeneas made his way back to his ships and comrades. I think it’s loose ends like this that Virgil wanted to go carefully back through his poem and tie up and prompted his request to have it destroyed.

King Latinus proposes that they give a tract of land they own to the Trojans to settle and send 100 men bearing the branch of peace and gifts.

Drances (his voice was ‘always a force for discord’) accuses Turnus of ‘fatal recklessness’, says he is the sole cause of all this grief and lamentation, and says Turnus must accept the loss of his bride and her gift to Aeneas.

Infuriated Turnus refutes all his arguments, calls Drances a coward, says the Trojans have been twice defeated before, the dead have fallen nobly, this is the time to test their vigour and virtue, they must fight on, Italy has many more allies they can call on etc. If Aeneas challenges him to single combat, so be it. This is a moment for courage and glory.

Their great debate is interrupted when news arrives that Aeneas has brought his great army of Trojans and allies out of their camp, across the plain and is threatening their city. Turnus takes control, shouting instructions to his commanders and rousing the young men for renewed battle.

The mothers mount the battlements, the queen escorting young Lavinia, ‘the cause of all this suffering’. Poor young woman. Like Helen, made the scapegoat for thousands of toxic men hacking each other to death. A lot is written about Dido because her emotional suffering is fully dramatised. But next to nothing about poor Lavinia and the guilt and trauma she must be suffering.

While the women lament Turnus dresses in his glowing armour, tossing his head like a virile stallion at the peak of his powers. Camilla joins him and asks the honour of facing the enemy first. Turnus replies he has heard Aeneas is sending his light-armed cavalry into the plain, but bringing his forces on a secret route. Turnus plans to ambush them; Camilla can lead the armies which face the cavalry.

Cut to the goddess Diana, in heaven, who tells us Camilla’s life story, brought up in the wild by Metabus, rejected by his own people. When he had fled them he came to a raging river, dedicated his baby’s life to Diana, tied the baby Camilla to a javelin and threw it across the river to embed in a tree, then swam across himself and retrieved her. She was raised in the wild, fed on wild milk and berries, taught to handle weapons from childhood, dressed in a tiger skin.

Now Diana laments that she will die in this pointless war but sends one of her entourage of nymphs, Opis, down with arrows and instructions to avenge whoever kills Camilla.

The two cavalry forces line up on the plain in front of Latinum, then charge. The usual role call of huge warriors who hack each other to death. But the descriptions lead up to Camilla’s aristeia, her moment of warrior excellence, as she fells fighter after fighter, with mocking taunts.

All this rouses Tarchon leader of the Etruscans to fury and he berates his comrades as cowards, before killing Venulus, racing across the battlefield like fire.

Camilla is pursuing a man named Chloreus, but unknown to her Arruns is stalking her. He makes a prayer to Phoebus Apollo then throws his spear. It pierces Camilla’s chest, she falls and her life bleeds away as she has a last death speech to her closest companion, Acca, telling her to go fetch Aeneas. Then her spirit departs for the underworld.

Opis sees all this. Charged with avenging Camilla by Diana, she now speaks words of revenge, feathers her bow and shoots Arruns, who falls in the dust of the plain, while Opis flew back up to heaven.

Meanwhile the Latins break and flee back to their city pursued by the Trojans and their allies. Panic stricken Latins close the gates behind them, locking out many of their comrades who are crushed in the press or slaughtered. Mothers pack the ramparts and throw down rocks and logs onto the attackers.

Acca brings news of all this to Turnus who bitterly abandons his planned ambush in the woods, and turns his forces back towards the city. Moments later Aeneas and his forces enter the valley where Turnus had planned to ambush him. The fortunes of war. The two columns of troops hear each other and see each other’s dust but night is falling, it is too late for a battle. They both camp under the city walls.

Book 12 Truce and duel

Another one of those non-sequiturs or jumps. Book 11 ends with night falling and Turnus’s army apparently camped outside the city walls not far from Aeneas’s: ‘They both encamped before the city and built stockades on their ramparts’ (11.914).

But the first line of book 12 describes Turnus in the process of watching the Latin line broken and the tide of battle going against them, as if it was back in the middle of the fight, on the day Camilla is killed and the Trojans take heart. Not only that but, once he’s seen this, he turns and addresses King Latinus i.e. he is no longer in a camp outside the walls, but somewhere in the king’s chambers inside the city, maybe on the battlements.

Anyway, he tells Latinus to draw up a treaty, call for peace and allow Turnus to go out and fight Aeneas in single combat. Latinus gives a long winded reply, appears to vacillate, laments never being able to make his mind up. Queen Amata weighs in, still insisting that that Lavinia must marry Turnus, still seeing Turnus as the sole support for her family and kingship, and so weeping at the thought of him confronting Aeneas. Nonetheless, Turnus orders an officer, Idmon, to carry a challenge to Aeneas of single combat at dawn the next day.

At which point he ‘rushes back into the palace’ – so where were they all standing during this conversation? On the battlements?

Anyway, Turnus arrays himself in his magnificent armour – which seems a little pointless because the duel isn’t scheduled until the next morning. Next morning dawn comes and men from both sides set out the duelling field. But Juno, troublesome to the last, goes to see Juturna, a nymph and sister of Turnus, tells her he risks dying today and encouraging her to do whatever she can to save him.

Latinus arrives dressed in splendour. Devout Aeneas, Father of Rome, arrives and makes a great invocation to the gods and swears that if he loses the Trojans will withdraw, but that if he wins they will live in peace with the Latins. Latinus swears a similarly solemn vow, then they murder beasts and rip out their entrails while they’re still alive to festoon the altars. (God, the sadness of things.)

But remember Juturna? Now she takes the form of Camers and wanders through the Rutulians and Laurentines, telling them it is a shame to let Turnus die, a shame on them to let their lands be taken by the incomers, pointing out how few they are, how easy it would be to defeat them etc. And then she inspires an omen in the sky when an eagle swoops down on a swan and is carrying it away when a flock of smaller birds all attack it and force it to drop its prey i.e. Aeneas is the eagle, Turnus the beautiful swan, and the Rutulians and Laurentines the men she is whipping up to break the truce.

At the sight Tolumnius the augur cries out and throws his spear. It kills one of nine brothers and the other eight grab their swords and spears and run shouting towards the Laurentine ranks. And that is how easy it is to restart a war. The violence, the lust for violence, sitting just beneath the surface of things.

More slaughter. Aeneas tries to restore the peace, calling his men to stop fighting but out of nowhere an arrow strikes him. Turnus sees him withdrawing from the field and a wild hope inflames him. Turnus runs through his enemies, massacring and murdering.

Aeneas is helped limping to his camp by an entourage of soldiers and is attended by Iapyx but he can do nothing, the arrow is embedded deep. Meanwhile the raging Rutulians approach closer, the sound of battle gets louder, the cavalry rides up to the walls and arrows fly into the camp.

So Venus flies to Mount Ida and plucks the herb dittany, returns to the Trojans camp and, unseen, infuses the water with it, and with it panacea and juices of ambrosia. When washed with this the arrow comes out and Aeneas’s wound is healed. Iapyx immediately realises this was done by the power of some god.

So Aeneas takes his huge spear (there is much emphasis on the sheer size of this spear) and returns to the battlefield and the Rutulians quail and Juturna runs and hides. The Trojans pursue but Aeneas disdains to fight anyone except Turnus.

Once again Juturna intervenes, this time changing herself into the shape of Turnus’s charioteer, and deliberately driving Turnus away from the hottest parts of the battle. Aeneas doggedly tries to spy and chase him but is getting worn out when someone flings a spear at him which cuts off the plume of his helmet and he really loses it, going fighting mad. The poem matches the massacres and blood-lust frenzied killing of both Aeneas and Turnus.

Then Venus puts it into his head to attack the city of the Latins, terrify them and, if Turnus won’t confront him, burn it to the ground. He rallies his men and they storm the city, siege ladders, javelins, fire, cut to pieces the guards at the gate. Terror spreads in the city, some wanting to open the gates, others vowing to defend it and chucking rocks down on the besiegers.

Queen Amata thinks Turnus must be dead, and it’s her fault, and hangs herself. Lavinia is distraught and tears her golden hair and rosy cheeks. Latinus wanders the palace corridors strewing his hair with dirt and dust.

Far away on the battlefield Turnus hears the sounds of lamentation carried on the wind and pauses. Juturna tries to egg him on to fight but Turnus tells her he realised who she was some time ago, but acknowledges she is sent by some higher power. Now he is tired. He has seen too many of his comrades cut down. He is ready to die honourably and go down to the underworld with honour.

Saces rides up and tells him the city is under attack, Queen Amata is dead, the Trojans are storming the gates, they are throwing firebrands over the walls to torch it. Only he can save them!

Turnus tells his sister he recognises his destiny. The time has come. The fates are too strong. He abandons his grieving sister and runs across the battlefield up to the walls where the fighting is fiercest. He calls out to both sides to cease fire and proclaims he will keep the words of the treaty and fight in single combat.

Throughout the poem Aeneas has been getting bigger, as symbolised by his steadily swelling javelin. And now he is as immense as Mount Athos or Mount Eryx as he comes running towards Turnus. The two go straight into fierce combat without any pauses or fancy speeches. They throw spears then run on to attack each other with swords.

But when Turnus brings his down with a mighty crash is shatters on the armour of Vulcan. Weaponless he takes to flight and Aeneas chases him. The poem has become more punctuated with epic similes and now they come thick and fast and become evermore extended, stretching to a quarter and even a third of a page long, comparing the fighters to mountains, bulls, a stag chased by a hunting dog, as Aeneas flies after Turnus, threatening anyone who tries to help him with instant death.

Aeneas comes up to the tree stump where the spear he through at the start of the contest has stuck fast. While he is struggling to wangle it free Juturna (again) comes forward and gives Turnus the sword he has been seeking so long. So that now the two huge heroes can turn to face each other fully armed.

And now Jupiter makes a final speech to Juno, telling the end of her vendetta has come. She has brought pain and suffering and death on countless houses. Now is the time to give up her anger.

Juno finally acquiesces, but with just one demand. That the people of Latium not give up their name and be absorbed by the Trojans, but the reverse: that the descendants of the peace and marriages which will follow retain the name of Latins and Italians. And here, at the climax of the poem, Jupiter agrees. He will make them one people, Latins, speaking one tongue and no other race will be their equals in doing her honour.

Satisfied, Juno withdraws, and that clears the path for this long tale of violence, finally, to come to an end. Next the Father of the Gods sends down a Dira, one of the dire creatures which sharpen the fears of suffering mortals in times of plague or war. This flies down and takes the form of a bird and batters again and again into Turnus’s face. A strange numbness came over him and he melted with fear. Hardly fair, is it, but then nothing the gods do is fair.

Juturna recognises the dira for what it is and has a page-long lament at the bitterness of the eternal life she has been granted if it is to be spent for her dear brother, but she realises the game is up and plunges down into the depths of her river.

Back on the level of mortals, Aeneas continues his pursuit of Turnus, taunting him, saying this is not a race. Turnus halts and picks up an enormous rock, so big it would take 12 men of the modern age to lift it, and throws it at Aeneas. But his strength fails, his knees give way, he drops it and it rolls harmlessly away. Turnus is like one in a dream, unable to move, unable to escape. He looks around, at the soldiers surrounding him, up at the city, and trembles at the death that is upon him.

Then Aeneas throws his spear big as a tree which crashes like a thunderbolt through Turnus’s armour and pierces his thigh. On his knees Turnus stretches out his arms in supplication, begging Aeneas to think of his father, granting him victory and the hand of Lavinia but begging for mercy.

Aeneas hesitates, but then he catches sight of the baldric – the belt warriors wear over one shoulder and hang their swords from – which belonged to Pallas and which Turnus took from the beautiful young man’s body after he killed him. And the sight drives him wild with anger and he declares he is exacting vengeance for Pallas and plunges his sword up to the hilt in Turnus’s chest.

The limbs of Turnus were dissolved in cold and his life left him with a groan, fleeing in anger down to the shades.

Anger is the dominant mode, right to the bitter end.

Anger management

More than anything, more than love or destiny or patriotism or heroism, the poem is about anger. Almost all the characters are angry, almost all the time. Juno is furious at the Trojans, at Venus, and at Jupiter for protecting the Trojans. Venus is furious at the way her son is being treated. The Greeks who destroy Troy and massacre its population are driven by insensate rage. Dido has a brief spell of happiness and then is driven into a frenzy of anger at Aeneas’s betrayal. The Trojan women on Sicily are driven into wild fury by Juno. And Juno creates the entire second half of the book by commissioning Allecto to inspire wild anger in the hearts of Queen Amata, Turnus and then the farmers whose stag Ascanius kills. And once war escalates, then everyone is inspired to further fury by someone they loved or are related to being killed. And so the poem paints a terrifying picture of an entire world consumed with anger.

Anger is, after all, the subject of the Iliad, the first and greatest epic in the European tradition, whose opening words are:

Sing, goddess, of the anger of Achilles

Maybe an epic poem is a long poem about male rage.

Sore loser

But then – when it comes down to it, the entire poem lasts so long because of a woman, because of Juno’s sustained opposition to Aeneas’s predestined fate. For 12 long books she opposes and delays his inevitable destiny. And for why? Her enmity stems from not being chosen as the most beautiful goddess by Paris. The Aeneid is so long because Juno was the sore loser in a beauty contest. Male rage and female fury.

Roman reviews

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by Simon on September 5, 2022  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on September 5, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/09/05/the-aeneid-virgil-books-10-to-12/

The Relapse by John Vanbrugh (1696)

Sir John Vanbrugh wrote a handful of plays before going on to a complete change of career, and becoming one of England’s finest country house architects, whose masterpieces include palatial private homes such as Castle Howard and Blenheim Palace.

The Relapse, or, Virtue in Danger, the first of his plays, was in fact a sequel to someone else’s.

The original play was Love’s Last Shift, or, The Fool in Fashion written in 1695 by a young actor-dramatist, Colley Cibber. In Cibber’s play a free-living Restoration rake named Loveless is brought to repentance and reform by the ruses of his wife-to-be, Amanda. Supposedly, Vanbrugh saw the play and realised the ending didn’t really conclude the story. So he conceived The Relapse, in which the ‘reformed’ rake comes back up to London from his happy rural love nest, and succumbs all over again to the bright lights and pretty women.

The cast

The men

Sir Novelty Fashion, newly created Lord Foppington
Young Fashion, his Brother
Loveless, Husband to Amanda
Worthy, a Gentleman of the Town
Sir Tunbelly Clumsey, a Country Gentleman
Sir John Friendly, his Neighbour
Coupler, a Matchmaker
Bull, Chaplain to Sir Tunbelly
Syringe, a Surgeon
Lory, Servant to Young Fashion
Shoemaker, Taylor, Perriwig-maker, &c.

The women

Amanda, Wife to Loveless
Berinthia, her Cousin, a young Widow
Miss Hoyden, a great Fortune, Daughter to Sir Tunbelly
Nurse, her Governant,

The plot

Loveless is the reformed rake who has retired to the country with his pure and noble wife, Amanda.

Most of their dialogue consists of high-minded sentiments of fidelity and marital honesty cast in unrhymed verse or poetry. Being used to the oppressively consistent rhyming couplets of Alexander Pope and 18th century poets, and even the solidly iambic pentameters of Shakespeare’s plays, I was pleasantly surprised to find this verse more irregular and varied, with some lines having six beats, some only three.

Can you then doubt my Constancy, Amanda?
You’ll find ’tis built upon a steady Basis——
The Rock of Reason now supports my Love,
On which it stands so fix’d,
The rudest Hurricane of wild Desire
Wou’d, like the Breath of a soft slumbering Babe,
Pass by, and never shake it.

Fortunately, however, these insipid lovers are not the prominent figures. They decide – rashly – to come up to London on business, both swearing they won’t be tempted back to their wicked old ways – with inevitable results.

The play only really gets going with the introduction of Young Fashion and his servant Lory. Fashion is the second son and so has inherited a measly £200-a-year allowance and has managed to blow all of that so that, as the play opens, he is skint. His enterprising servant, Lory, makes the obvious suggestion that he apply to his elder brother, Sir Novelty Fashion, who inherited most of the family fortune.

Sir Novelty Fashion has only recently (within 48 hours) paid for and received the title of Lord i.e. he is now Lord Foppington. He is the most spectacularly grand and affectedly foppish fop I’ve encountered in any of these plays and he is a marvel, a cynosure of extravagant pretension, and he really lights up the play every time he appears.

Why the Ladies were ready to puke at me, whilst I had nothing but Sir Novelty to recommend me to ’em——Sure whilst I was but a Knight, I was a very nauseous Fellow… [but now I am a Lord] Well, ’tis an unspeakable Pleasure to be a Man of Quality —— Strike me dumb —— ‘My Lord’ —— ‘Your Lordship’ —— ‘My Lord Foppington’ — Ah! c’est quelque chose de beau, que le Diable m’emporte ——

The only catch is that the honour cost him £10,000! leaving him short of ready cash. Thus, when his starveling kid brother turns up begging for his debts to be paid off, Lord Foppington dismisses him with an airy wave and says he has to go dine with important people. Young Fashion is mortified and aggrieved.

Just after he’s been humiliatingly dismissed, Young Fashion bumps into Old Coupler, a marriage arranger who’s known him since he was a boy. Coupler also dislikes Lord Foppington and so the two quickly cobble together A Plan.

Coupler had been hired to find a rich widow who Lord Foppington can marry in a hurry to pay off his debts, and has contracted with a nice plump partridge of a widow woman living fifty miles away in the country. Lord Fashion had promised to pay Coupler £1,000 once the marriage was secured. Coupler now says that for £5,000 (!) he will secure the rich widow for Young Fashion.

The Plan is simple: Lord Foppington wrote the widow’s family to expect him in two weeks’ time; Young Fashion should go straightaway and pretend to be his brother, sign the contract, bed the widow, and bob’s your uncle. Or as Coupler puts it:

Now you shall go away immediately; pretend you writ that letter only to have the romantick Pleasure of surprizing your Mistress; fall desperately in Love, as soon as you see her; make that your Plea for marrying her immediately; and when the fatigue of the Wedding-night’s over, you shall send me a swinging Purse of Gold, you Dog you.

‘A swinging purse of gold’. This is by far the most vividly and clearly written of the Restoration plays I’ve read recently – Vanbrugh has a lovely swinging style.

They shake on the deal. When Coupler has gone, Young Fashion has a sudden pang of conscience, and vows he will give his brother a second chance to take pity.

If you take a ‘moral’ or psychological view of literature or plays, this shows that Young Fashion has a conscience and ‘develops the play’s themes of responsibility’.

But I don’t take that kind of view. I tend to think of works of literature as language machines built to deliver a wide range of often complex and sophisticated pleasures, and I’m interested in analysing the mechanisms and linguistic tools they use to do so.

So on my reading – divested of its ‘moral’ content – this decision to give Lord Foppington a second chance is really just a pretext for another comic scene with the monstrous Lord Fashion.

Act 2

Amanda and Loveless arrive at their London lodgings and have a long poetic exchange in which both reveal, to each other and themselves, that they have been a little distracted by the pleasures of the Town i.e. the opposite sex. Loveless in particular reveals that he went to the play the night before and was struck by a stunning beauty. Amanda is understandably upset but Loveless insists he admired but didn’t speak.

At that moment the servant announces the visit of Amanda’s cousin, Berinthia, and damn me if she isn’t exactly the woman Loveless was struck with the night before! Barely has Loveless recovered from this surprise, when Lord Foppington pays a visit.

Foppington gives a comic account of a Day in The Life of a Fop, note the affected pronunciation whereby ‘o’ is pronounced ‘a’ in ‘nat’ and ‘bax’:

I rise, Madam, about ten o’clock. I don’t rise sooner, because ’tis the worst thing in the World for the Complection; nat that I pretend to be a Beau; but a Man must endeavour to look wholesome, lest he make to nauseous a Figure in the Side-bax, the Ladies shou’d be compell’d to turn their eyes upon the Play.

Foppington goes on to explain in the most cynical way possible one attends church solely for the Society one meets there and has nothing to do with religion. Having regarded Amanda for some time, he thinks he is in love with her and, with absurd miscalculation takes her hand, kisses it and declares his passion for her.

Foppington has heroically misjudged, for Amanda snatches back her hand and boxes him round the ears, then Loveless draws his sword, engages him in a duel and appears to run him through. In fact it is the barest of scratches but the women run screaming and return with a doctor, Syringe, an excellent comic turn who declares it is a wound large enough to drive a coach and horses through and extorts a fee of £500 from Foppington before he gets servants to carry the Lord to the doctor’s house.

Consistent with his pretentious style, Foppington grandly forgives Loveless as he is carried away, as if from his death bed, but once he’s gone, Loveless tells Amanda it was just a scratch.

Enter a citizen named Worthy, who performs a structural function, namely while Loveless returns to lusting after Berinthia, Worthy can start to have designs on Amanda, creating a neat parallelism.

The menfolk leave the stage to Amanda and Berinthia who have a long dialogue about Modern Man and love affairs.

Over the course of this long scene Berinthia creates a kind of atmosphere of urban naughtiness in which Amanda is encouraged to slowly reveal her secrets. Berinthia explains that Worthy is a kind of anti-fop or anti-beau; an outwardly sensible sober man – but in fact he is quietly having affairs with half the women of quality in the Town.

By encouraging Amanda to speculate what she would do if Loveless were to die (God forbid!), Berinthia encourages her to think about a successor and replacement for her husband, and thus slyly encourages her to start to harbour thoughts about ‘other men’. Corrupts her, in other words.

Act 3

Scene 1

Lord Foppington is recovered (from his scratch) and preparing to go out when he is visited for the second time by his brother, Young Fashion, who proceeds from politely asking his brother to help him out, to pleading consanguinity, to becoming more and more infuriated by his unprovocable nonchalance.

Young Fashion: Now, by all that’s great and powerful, thou art the Prince of Coxcombs.
Lord Foppington: Sir — I am praud of being at the Head of so prevailing a Party.

Fashion vows to tame maximum revenge on his brother.

Scene 2

Loveless, in heroic poetry, ponders his mixed feelings. He knows he owes his wife everything, and yet.. and while he’s hesitating, the beautiful Berinthia enters and, after some flirting, they catch hold of each other in a big snog! They have barely begun kissing before a servant enters to say Amanda has arrived home, Loveless exists, Berinthia has a paragraph sighing about him — which is overheard by Worthy who has just entered.

Worthy now tells Berinthia he saw everything and so has her in his power. He wants to use her to persuade Amanda to have an affair with him, Worthy. Worthy proposes a precise Scheme: Berinthia should persuade Amanda that Loveless is having an affair with someone else; then Berinthia can a) pose as her friend b) carry on her affair with Loveless unsuspected. Berinthia can confirm that, during her earlier conversation, Amanda had admitted that – her husband gone – she could be tempted to another man, and even that Worthy might be a candidate.

Exit Worthy. Berinthia now finds herself in the position of carrying Worthy’s cause forward for him, not quite pimping for him, but… Vanbrugh disappoints me a little by having her express some stock anti-women sentiments:

I begin to fancy there may be as much pleasure in carrying on another body’s Intrigue, as one’s own. This at least is certain, it exercises almost all the entertaining Faculties of a Woman: For there’s employment for Hypocrisy, Invention, Deceit, Flattery, Mischief, and Lying.

Mind you, this is immediately followed by the entrance of Amanda who is in a foul mood with her husband, suspecting him of infidelity, with many insults and aspersions. Berinthia follows Worthy’s Plan and encourages her doubts, indeed says she knows exactly who her husband is in love with, without naming names (and of course she does – it is herself!).

Scene 3. The country house

Hilarious scene where Young Fashion and Lory arrive at the country house of the plump partridge widow who Coupler has recommended. It starts with the house being semi derelict and the door only reluctantly opened by suspicious yokels armed with a blunderbuss and scythes, led by the crude country squire, Mr Tunbelly Clumsy.

Cut to the country widow in question, Miss Hoyden who, in a bit of comic business, Sir Tunbelly orders to be locked up anytime anybody pays a visit. She appears to be quite a rude, rustic yokel of a young woman. Meanwhile Young Fashion impresses himself on Sir Tunbelly as a confident London fop and tries to hurry along the deal – can’t they get married that very night?

Act 4. Still at the country house

In a brief scene Miss Hoyden tells her Nurse she is keen to be married simply in order to escape the country, get up to London and start flaunting like a Grand Lady. Enter Young Fashion and he and Miss Hoyden quickly reach agreement that they should be married immediately. They call in the Nurse so Young Fashion can flatter her, give her half a crown, and get her on their side. And then ask her to use her influence with the local chaplain to get them married in a hurry. Luckily, it turns out the Nurse has been flirting with the chaplain for these past seven years, so it should be a doddle.

Scene 2

Cut to Amanda and Berinthia praising Worthy as a most excellent lover, dwelling on how he spent a couple of hours praising every one of Amanda’s features. Then Worthy himself walks in, apologises for the lateness of the hour, says he’s been sent by Loveless to say that Loveless is out very late with friends and so the women invite Worthy to make up a hand of ombre (a card game).

Scene 3. Berinthia’s chamber

Enter Loveless. He has completely ceased to be the ideal husband of act one and has reverted to being a scheming rake. He has gotten access to Berinthia’s bed chamber and now ponders where to hide. He has barely hidden in the closet before Berinthia enters, explaining that she left Worthy and Amanda to play cards, begging the excuse of having to write some letters. Loveless springs out of her closet and they embrace. After some flirting he carries her into the ‘closet’ (which is obviously more like an actual room) to ravish her!

Scene 4. Sir Tunbelly’s House

Young Fashion and Miss Hoyden have just been married by the vicar, Bull, and are congratulating each other when Lory rushes in to tell them that his brother – the real Lord Foppington – has arrived at the gates with a coach and horses and 20 pages and the full panoply. Sir Tunbelly arrives to ask what the devil is gong on, and Fashion braves it out, telling him the man claiming to be Lord Foppington is an imposter and they’ll deal with him by inviting him in, raising the drawbridge, then firing a few shots which will make his people scatter.

Scene 5. At the gate

They carry out this plan. Tunbelly admits Lord Foppington, and as soon as he’s inside the gates swings them shut, his servants fire a few shots in the air and all Lord Foppington’s servants scarper. When Lord Foppington declares who he is, Sir Tunbelly (who may be a country bumpkin but is also justice of the peace in these parts) calls him as a rascally imposter come to ravish his daughter and orders him to be tied down. The rest of the family come in to abuse him, Miss Hoyden as was, declaring he deserves to be dragged through the horse pond. Lord Foppington takes this all with tremendously aristocratic sang-froid.

The comedy heightens when Young Fashion enters and Foppington’s familiarity with him (calling him Tom since he is, after all, his younger brother) offends the other characters (the lady, Tunbelly, even Bull the chaplain). They all clamour for more punishment. Foppington is intelligent enough to realise all the people regard Tom as Lord Foppington and decides his best course is to play along, so he switches to calling him that, asking him for a close-up quiet parley in private. Tom comes close and Lord Foppington offers his brother £5,000 to be set free (!). Too late, says Tom.

His offer rejected, Foppington suddenly remembers there is a local gentleman who will vouch that he is Lord Foppington and Young Fashion a mere rascal. Who? asks Tunbelly sarcastically. Why Sir John Friendly. ‘Tis true he lives not a mile away and has just returned from London, admits Tunbelly – and sends a servant to fetch him.

But as chance would have it the servant comes straight back to tell Tunbelly that good Sir John has just alighted at the main gate and is entering the house. Young Fashion realises the game is up. He tells Lory to run and secure the first two horse he finds in the stables, Tom will slip out in a few minutes and they’ll leg it. Lory and Young Fashion slip out one door as Sir John enters by another.

There is a big Revelation Scene when Sir John finally gets to see Lord Foppington and confirms he is who he claims to be – the result is mortification and humiliation on the part of Sir Tunbelly who immediately swears fire and vengeance on Young Fashion, the imposter. But he’s long gone.

In a final short scene the Nurse, Miss Hoyden and Bull are in a conclave in the next room wondering how on earth to get out of the dilemma of Miss H being just married to Young Fashion when Lord Foppington and, more importantly, her father think she is still a maid. The solution they all innocently / cynically / comically decide on is: She shall simply marry again.

Act 5

Scene 1

Back in London. Young Fashion and Lory meet with Coupler, tell him the whole story and he caps it with what he’s heard, which is that Lord Foppington did swiftly marry Miss Hoyden – who is therefore now Lady Foppington – as told in a letter from Foppington himself in which he a) swears revenge on Young Fashion b) says that, although they are legally married, he has not yet fulfilled the divine part i.e. physically consummated the marriage.

Tom Fashion’s vexed rage prompts some good comic lines.

Coupler: Nothing’s to be done till the Bride and Bridegroom come to Town.
Young Fashion: Bride and Bridegroom! Death and Furies! I can’t bear that thou shouldst call them so.
Coupler: Why, what shall I call them, Dog and Cat?

They’re not the funniest lines ever, just expressed in a surprisingly modern, direct and understandable way which makes them feel funnier.

Anyway, Coupler suggests that they seek some kind of solution by suborning the priest, Bull who, like most modern priests, ‘eats three pounds of beef to reading one chapter’ of his Bible.

Scene 2

Worthy tells Berinthia he has all but seduced Amanda but she is still holding out with a last scruple about ‘Virtue’. Berinthia comes up with A Plan. Lord Foppington is having a Grand Supper tonight with dancing and music to celebrate his marriage. Berinthia will arrange for Amanda to see Loveless at a tryst with his lover; Amanda will be so furious, she’ll come home filled with thoughts of revenge and a little lewdness, and Worthy can pay a polite visit to escort her to Foppington’s supper and – whoops – take advantage of Amanda’s taste for revenge!

There is then another of the many comic touches which really lift this play. Worthy is so awed by Berinthia’s Machiavellianism, that he gets down on his knees before her:

Worthy [Kneeling] Thou Angel of Light, let me fall down and adore thee.
Berinthia: Thou Minister of Darkness, get up again, for I hate to see the Devil at his Devotions.

Scene 3. Tom Fashion’s lodgings

Coupler has a Plan: Some vicar has died leaving a £500-a-year living empty, and Tom has it in his gift if he can prove himself the lawful wife of Miss Hoyden.

To this end they have summoned the Nurse and the Priest to Tom’s lodgings. Initially scared at finding themselves confronted by the ‘Rogue’, Coupler sends the priest into another room with Lory, while he and Tom work on the Nurse. Tom tells her he would and will make a much better husband for Miss Hoyden than the Lord.

They go on to say that if the couple will vouch Tom is the legal husband, he will immediately present the priest with the £500 living. The Nurse is convinced. When the priest is brought back in, the three of them convince him to vouch for Tom and to win both her and the living. Coupler has some comic lines about the Nurse, comparing her to a rather rundown house:

Coupler: [Rising up.] .. The Living’s worth it: Therefore no more Words, good Doctor: but with the [Giving Nurse to him.] Parish — here — take the Parsonage-house. ‘Tis true, ’tis a little out of Repair; some Dilapidations there are to be made good; the Windows are broke, the Wainscot is warp’d, the Ceilings are peel’d, and the Walls are crack’d; but a little Glasing, Painting, White-wash, and Plaster, will make it last thy time.

You can imagine the gestures confident Coupler would make at the bewildered Nurse during this speech. Vanbrugh’s dialogue is vivid and dramatic.

Scene 4

Amanda gets home furious at having seen her husband meet with his sweetheart. Worthy is lying in wait for her and indulges in an extended seduction in high-flown rhetoric which involves forcing her onto a couch and kissing her hand. But, although torn, Amanda remains true to herself.

Amanda: Then, save me, Virtue, and the Glory’s thine.
Worthy: Nay, never strive.
Amanda: I will; and conquer too. My Forces rally bravely to my Aid, [Breaking from him.] and thus I gain the Day.

Not only this, but she preaches a sermon at Worthy, telling him to repent his fleshly urges and succeeds. He is given a speech saying he has seen the error of his ways.

Scene 5

The Nurse explains the situation to Miss Hoyden-Lady Foppinton, who in any case doesn’t like her pretentious new husband half so much as the first one.

Scene 6. Foppington’s supper

Enter Foppington, Miss Hoyden, Loveless, Amanda, Worthy and Berinthia. Foppington apologises for wooing Loveless’s wife (the pretext, if you remember, for the sword fight in act 2). Loveless forgives him.

Enter Sir Tunbelly and musicians and dancers, as at the end of every Restoration comedy. Tunbelly is the master of ceremonies and is drunk. A lengthy masque in which Cupid and Hymen present versified forms of their characters and cases.

Enter Tom Fashion with the Priest and Nurse who he lines up to testify in front of everyone that he – Tom – married Miss Hoyden first, to which Miss Hoyden herself testifies. Astonished, Lord Foppington asks the priest if it’s true.

It’s very funny that Sir Tunbelly is raving drunk and has to be held back from attacking Tom with a horsewhip. He is particularly upset when he discover the Nurse he has employed all these years lied to him. Why did she do it? The Nurse replies, because Miss Hoyden so wanted to be married.

Tom asks ‘the court’ of all the characters for their judgment and they declare him the honest husband. Sir Tunbelly says they can all go to hell and reels out drunk. Beautifully, Lord Foppington rises above it all with effortless superiority.

The epilogue

The epilogue is spoken by Foppington and is the only one of the half dozen I’ve read which I either understood or enjoyed because it is a further hymn to the wonderful superiority of noble beaux such as himself and how they have never lowered themselves to plots or violence or treason or criminality – Good Lord, no, such things are only done by the badly dressed – and so continues the comic conceit of his character right to the end of the play.

Vanbrugh’s prose

Vanbrugh’s prose is immeasurably more lucid and easy to read than the other Restoration figures I’ve been reading.

Lory. Why then, Sir, your Fool advises you to lay aside all Animosity, and apply to Sir Novelty, your elder Brother.
Young Fashion: Damn my elder Brother.
Lory: With all my heart; but get him to redeem your Annuity, however.
Young Fashion: My Annuity! ‘Sdeath, he’s such a Dog, he would not give his Powder-Puff to redeem my Soul.

It’s still 17th century prose, obvz, but it seems to me beautifully clear and easy to follow, and the clarity makes the vigour of the simile all the more vivid. I’m not sure it’s the best, exactly, but it strikes me as being the clearest of the comedies I’ve read:

Berinthia: Pray which Church does your Lordship most oblige with your Presence?
Lord Foppington: Oh, St. James‘s, Madam – There’s much the best Company.
Amanda: Is there good Preaching too?
Lord Foppington: Why, faith, Madam, I can’t tell. A Man must have very little to do there, that can give an Account of the Sermon.

See how brisk the dialogue is – question, answer, question, answer, leading up to a comic punchline – the joke being (in case it’s not obvious in this quote taken out of context) that Foppington is such a very model of a Restoration aristocrat that religion is quite literally the last thing he goes to church for; in fact the blasted sermonising etc gets in the way of the socialising!

There’s something intrinsically comic about a character asking a question and the the second character repeating the substance of the question but with a comic reversal or alternative at the end:

Servant: Will your Lordship venture so soon to expose yourself to the Weather?
Lord Foppington: Sir, I will venture as soon as I can, to expose myself to the Ladies.

And the relationships in the play have just the same clarity and precision. I liked young Fashion, the poor younger brother from the moment he started talking, and really warmed to his long-suffering, inventice and sarcastic servant, Lory, and enjoyed their relationship immensely.

After young Fashion gives his older brother an opportunity to help him out financially, and he refuses to, Fashion declares his moral reservations at an end. It’s not the decision itself, it’s the alacrity with which Lory responds which makes it bracing and funny.

Young Fashion: Here’s rare News, Lory; his Lordship has given me a Pill has purg’d off all my Scruples.
Lory: Then my Heart’s at ease again: For I have been in a lamentable Fright, Sir, ever since your Conscience had the Impudence to intrude into your Company.
Young Fashion: Be at peace, it will come there no more: My Brother has given it a wring by the Nose, and I have kick’d it down Stairs.

Vanbrugh’s sentences are short and punchy. In his robust good humour, Lory reminds me a bit of Sam Weller in the Pickwick Papers.

The accent of a fop

Vanbrugh goes to pains to spell out Lord Foppington’s pronunciation. By the look of it, the kind of rarefied courtier he is aspiring to be had a particular accent or idiom, a distinctive way of pronouncing English. In particular, ‘o’ becomes ‘a’, so that ‘constitution’ and ‘horse’ become ‘canstitution’ and ‘harse’:

  • what between the Air that comes in at the Door on one side, and the intolerable Warmth of the Masks on t’other, a Man gets so many Heats and Colds, ‘twou’d destroy the Canstitution of a Harse.
  • Fore. My Lord, I have done. If you please to have more Hair in your Wig, I’ll put it in.
    Lord Foppington: Passitively, yes

‘Or’ becomes ‘ar’:

  • Lord Foppington: I have arder’d my Coach to the Door:

‘Ot’ becomes ‘at’:

  • Lord Foppington: … when I heard my Father was shat thro’ the Head

‘U’ becomes ‘e’, e.g. ‘judge’ becomes ‘jedge’.

  • Lord Foppington: As Gad shall jedge me, I can’t tell; for ’tis passible I may dine with some of aur Hause at Lacket‘s.

He calls his brother Tam instead of Tom:

  • Lord Foppington: Don’t be in a Passion, Tam; far Passion is the most unbecoming thing in the Warld

Misogyny and misandry

I was very struck when I read some of the feminist introductions to these plays to discover that feminist critics dismiss all Restoration comedies – and indeed all Restoration society – as misogynist.

I take the point that there is a lot of anti-women propaganda in the plays, and that, on a deeper level, you could say the women are treated like chattel. Except that when you actually read the plays, you discover that a lot of the women characters are tough, independent, free to come and go as they please, take lovers, attend the theatre, and that many of them have independent means and live very well.

I’m not suggesting 17th century London was like 21st century New York in terms of women’s liberation and legal equality, but having been warned about the utter oppression of women in the period, it comes as a surprise to discover how much freedom and independence they did have.

And as to statements or sentiments, for every specifically anti-woman generalisation, there is one attacking men. Thus Amanda and Berinthia in Act 5:

Berinthia: Ay, but there you thought wrong again, Amanda. You shou’d consider, that in Matters of Love Men’s Eyes are always bigger than their Bellies. They have violent Appetites, ’tis true, but they have soon din’d.
Amanda: Well; there’s nothing upon Earth astonishes me more than Men’s Inconstancy.

If you are a feminist and want to be offended by what characters say in a play, it’s easy to find hundreds of anti-women beliefs and sentiments. But it is just as easy to find groups of women expressing anti-men sentiments.

For my part, I see statements like this as the kind of glue which binds together the plot. The dialogues are composed of sententious clichés which fill the down-time between the more urgent comic events. Often the sentiments are tendentious, and characters are using these cliches and stereotypes to bend someone to their will (generally women being persuaded that all men are faithless so-and-sos or all men being persuaded that all women are, well, the same).

They are a kind of rhetorical lubrication which keeps the engine of the play – its comic plotline – ticking over. And the women give just as good as they get. Maybe better.

Good Gods—What slippery Stuff are Men compos’d of!
Sure the Account of their Creation’s false,
And ’twas the Woman’s Rib that they were form’d of.

Related links

More seventeenth century reviews

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by Simon on August 10, 2020  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on August 10, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/08/10/the-relapse-john-vanbrugh/